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This article is in a direct response to an article on Slate subtitled How Gmail destroyed Outlook. Farhad Manjoo has written an article explaining how to use Google Gears to take your Gmail account offline. However he has badly titled it The Best E-Mail Program Ever and subtitled it How Gmail destroyed Outlook.

If he had just left it titled something like Google Gears provides Gmail with offline capability I wouldnt have minded. But to attempt to use that feature to claim that Gmail is the best program ever or to even more ridiculously claim that Gmail has somehow destroyed Outlook as a result is farcical at best and completely misleading and untrue.

OK lets look at what he says and why.

First of all to explain some things.

Gmail is actually 2 separate things. It is an email account – that is it provides users with a email address that can be used in any email client using POP3, SMTP and or IMAP protocols to send and receive email. It is also a online email application, using a browser web page to enable access to your email. It has some cool features including conversation threading, search, each email “page” has a permalink. and some more dubious features such as the ability to search through your email and provide targeted advertising based on the content of your email.

Outlook on the other hand is only one thing. It is just an email client. That is, it can be used to provide access to any email account using POP3, SMTP, IMAP and connection with exchange servers.

However the comparisons between them are varied. Some of these are subjective and come down to personal taste. Others are very objective and can not be argued against.

Note – this comparison is between the applications client not the email address.

Brief (non comprehensive comparison between the Outlook and Gmail email applications.

Ok the last one isn’t really fair, but that’s because of the added benefit of using exchange which most corporate users have and take for granted. Of course that opens up another whole world of email management that Gmail cant possibly replicate or be compared to.

One of the biggest “features” Farhad is using to base his article on here is that Google Gears takes your mail offline. Well yes it does, but, only if you ask it to. It takes time, can be several minutes through to several hours. So unless you know before hand that you are going to be offline line and plan this (e.g. before getting on a plane) even this feature has limited use. I have used the Google Gears application to take my Google reader offline and it takes some time to download all the feeds to the local hard drive. If your internet access is cut due to some other reason, the Gmail client is about as useless as any other internet page.

My comment is posted on the Slate website titled Gmail cant destroy Outlook. The text is below.

This article has an extremely misleading and totally incorrect title. Gmail cannot and has not destroyed outlook. In fact Outlook makes Gmail work well. Any online mail client with a very limited ability to do rudimentary email management will never take over from a desktop client that has so many more powerful abilities. True the Google gears offline application is great. I use it for my Google reader. I do however prefer outlook for RSS feeds and for email where I have to do anything more than just read them. Corporates who have any sensitive information being emailed will never use an application like Gmail to handle their email. Outlook has features tied into Exchange that cannot possible be replicated in Gmail. Applications like XOBNI and Vista search make finding email in Outlook extremely painless and work much better than Gmail's search. This article would have been better titled, how to take your Gmail offline with Google gears - an alternate choice if you do not have Outlook. Running a Gmail account in Outlook is a way better choice for offline email management.

Summary

I would like to point out to Farhad that he has written a quite nice article about how to use Google Gears to take your email offline. He should have titled his article about that.

He has not in anyway shape or form written anything that explains how the lightweight Gmail web client – even combined with Google Gears can in any way compete with Outlook as a email client let alone destroy it!

Rather Outlook can be used to enhance Gmail’s email service by providing a great desktop client to read your Gmail email in.

Other references

Lifehacker has a (rather dated now) comparison between Outlook and Gmail. Most of the features they give the win to Outlook for functionality but to Gmail for usability and simpleness. Most of the reasons for that are tied into the complexity that Outlook offers, and in most cases using the Xobni plugin has directly solved these user interface things.