Download Squad is running the somewhat sensational headline, "Microsoft Launches Google Gears Competitor". The article points to the Microsoft Sync Framework CTP, built by the SQL Server team, and speculates that this could be a competitor to offline web frameworks such as Dojo Offline or Google Gears.
The competitive angle isn't so obvious, though. Microsoft Sync Framework is a programming model and set of services for a variety of clients to keep a set of data in sync. Think Groove, multi-master merge replication, and the like. Google Gears, on the other hand, is a browser extension intended to get around the size and functionality limits of browser cookies. Gears and the other offline toolkits don't have built-in services to handle multi-machine synchronization, a common scenario for web developers.
Things get really interesting when you realize that Microsoft Sync Framework is designed to be able to run atop Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). SSE is a way to do multi-master data replication purely atop RSS and Atom feeds. This means that any client which supports SSE synchronization can interact with clients using Microsoft Sync Framework (Lev Novik, the architect of Sync Framework will be demonstrating this scenario at DevConnections on Tuesday). While Sync Platform can also operate atop SQL Server, and Gears itself uses an open-source SQL database, it's fun to consider how the full end-to-end scenario could be accomplished using an ubiquitous low-tech technology like feeds. You will definitely be hearing more about this in the coming months.