Why Offline Support Matters

I usually love the 37 signals blog - Signal vs. Noise. I agree with a lot of what they say but their dismissal of offline support for apps just doesn't ring true to my experience.

The claim in the post is:

The idea of offline web applications is getting an undue amount of attention. Which is bizarre when you look at how availability of connectivity is ever increasing. EVDO cards, city-wide wifis, iPhones, Blackberry’s. There are so many ways to get online these days that the excitement for offline is truly puzzling.

Except here are the problems:

EVDO - cool idea. Not widespread and its expensive
City-wide wifi - ditto
iPhone - doesn't exist yet.
Blackberry - I can do email but what about everything else I need to do?

The reality is that there are a lot of us who need to work on things like say a Powerpoint or an Excel Spreadsheet and can't afford to have to be online in order for that application to work properly.

Here's a specific example of a place where you can be cooling your heels for a while and where it would be really useful to have an application that works offline - the VC office. Yes that's right. When Aggregate Knowledge was fundraising last year I would say that at least 50% of the VCs we talked to did not have open wifi. Combine - no wifi with a penchant for keeping people waiting and you're damn straight I love my offline apps. I won't leave home without them.

Comments

[P-Air]

Guess these guys don't spend much time working on spreadsheets in places where connectivity is less than perfect. More importantly, reliability of connections isn't assured everywhere (ie. when traveling by plane or even some airports) and like you said, EVDO or equivalent is expensive which is why I won't commit to it yet. This what happens when young people are born into a world where everything is operated by remote control, they forget that some times the batteries die and you have to get up off the couch to turn the TV on...good thing TVs still have the manual on/off switch ;) You may not use it often, but when you need it, you really need it.