More and more these days I find a computer without Internet to be increasingly useless. Google Docs' value proposition is irrevocably tied to its online status

More and more these days I find a computer without Internet to be increasingly useless. Google Docs' value proposition is irrevocably tied to its online status. It offers features that a strictly offline office suite does not. For Microsoft to be able to sell an offline Office, on a mobile, 3g-integrated computer, for Office prices, would require some functionality that they haven't come close to implementing. You would have to make some argument as to why your offline Office Light (lite for you colonials who insist upon spelling that corresponds to pronunciation) is better than the free, connected office suite Google offers. At the moment, Google Docs is Office Light. It offers a limited subset of Office's features, and doesn't do it particularly well. What it does do, extremely well, is make it easy to get the documents you create to your friends and co-workers. I can't see a limited-functionality, offline version of Office competing with that.