It’s been hinted at and talked about for a year and a half, when Garett Rogers Rogers at ZDNet pored through Google Docs source code and found references to “localhost” in the code.  Now Google Docs, through Google Gears, is available as an offline application. 

Word processing “in the cloud” isn’t that new an idea – Adobe has been working on a similar solution in Adobe Buzzword, and Adobe Air’s offline capabilities will probably find their way to the desktop.  Microsoft has, through SharePoint, been trying to take word processing from the desktop to the cloud, while Google has what may be the easier job of taking word processing from the cloud to the desktop.

In any case, these online apps are significant.  Even with volume licensing, word processing programs are not cheap; Google Docs is untested, but free, which makes it likely to be the office platform of choice for today’s startups – and today’s startups become tomorrow’s entrenched large businesses. 

There is a real trend for what were once completely offline apps – such as word processing – to become hybrid online/offline applications.  That means there’s more traffic – but of course, most of you already know that.

But what makes this traffic notable is that this is added traffic on the network that actually has every claim to being considered “business-critical” – compared to most sources of new traffic, which has been recreational. 

Worse, chances are you’re going to have to deal with the “cloud traffic” at the same time you have to deal with traditional client/server traffic.  Old technology solutions stick around while the new solutions get implemented, and sometimes even afterwards.  What we end up with is a hybrid model, where old and new technologies based on completely different standards are equally important – and that can be difficult for network engineers. 

Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch” makes a case – which we’ve argued against – that eventually all apps will become online apps.  Oh, if only that were the case!