Is Zoho Beating Google at its Own Offline Game?

AdventNet today added offline capabilities to Zoho Writer, the word processor component in its Web-based office suite. This makes Zoho Writer the first online office app to use Google Gears, the open-source libraries for offline Ajax that Google released

in June -- something that sounds particularly impressive given that Google's own Ajax-based Docs & Spreadsheets utility competes directly with Zoho and doesn't yet work with Gears. Zoho also scores over Google in the scope of its suite, targeting enterprise users with Web-based applications that include CRM, conferencing and project management.
But there's a big catch, which highlights the immaturity of offline Ajax applications in general. Right now, the offline version of Writer doesn't by itself let yet users write anything while offline: It's read-only, so users have to reconnect to the network if they want to make changes to a document.
Similarly, the only Google application yet to use Gears is Google Reader, which downloads RSS feeds for offline viewing. Like document viewing in Zoho, this simply downloads content from a Web service for caching on the local PC, so it doesn't have to handle the awkward issue of version management and synchronization -- something not built into Google Gears. With Web-based office suites aimed at collaborative editing and document sharing, taking files offline can easily result in multiple forks floating around.
Zoho plans to add full offline editing capabilities to Writer, as well as extend the use of Google Gears to its other products. In the meantime, Zoho offers plugins for Microsoft Office that enable Word and Excel to connect directly to the Zoho Web service. Competitor ThinkFree already offers a Web-based Office suite that can work offline, though this is based on Java rather than Ajax.