At the risk of sounding like a troll, which I'm genuinely not trying to be, this problem is more than solved when using Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365.
That works absolutely perfectly over unreliable connections and in offline mode.
It's also been around for nigh on 10-15 years now.
Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365 is a solution which suits some people. However, there are many for whom the Gmail, Calendar and Docs combo works better. Consider money, sharing and other factors and you'll see why the "been around for nigh on 10-15 years" doesn't mean much.
Money - if you know what you are doing, you get the partner action pack which costs me 259 GBP a year (22GBP/month) and gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro and Office 2010 Professional [1]. Office 365 is 4 GBP per month per user which costs me less than my monthly toilet roll bill.
Sharing - that's the point of exchange and outlook. It works and it supports all the relevant modern interoperability.
There's huge difference between easy access costing nothing extra and "knowing what you are doing" and 259GBP / year. For you, the setup you have chosen suits probably very well but please understand that it's not for everybody. I bet there are many people who would enjoy offline features and do not have the money and know-how for Outlook with hosted Exchange.
Relevant modern interoperability is a very loose concept. There are many types of sharing. Consider that with Google docs you can share a document for example as a web page for free.
Other factors such as already using one Google product such as Gmail and Google Contacts and the synergy of using other Google products.
But yes, I agree with you partially that this problem is solved. Just not for everybody.
have you read the 1st paragraph of the page you linked to ? That seems to exclude a lot of use cases:
"These software licenses are provided for use at your company’s primary business location only and must be used only for internal business purposes, conducting demonstrations with your customers, and training your employees. These licenses may not be used for direct revenue-generating activities (such as website or e-mail hosting, or custom solution development for monetary compensation). They also cannot be resold or used for personal reasons. "
>gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro
That is correct. It depends how you interpret it. The full terms are delivered during the signup process. The valid interpretations are (all confirmed by MS partner support on the telephone before I signed up)
a) I am a registered sole trader as are most startups and freelancers in the UK so it's covered under business use as there is a trading name. Training, certification, continuous product evaluation for clients and integration testing are suitable cases for personal use but do not include leisure (ie dont run a media centre with a license).
b) You can use the licenses for any purpose on workstations, server licenses for development, on machines which are portable and can be taken off site which are registered at the licensed location (confirmed by MS Partner support) and the windows 7 licenses can be used against OEM machines shipped with lesser versions of Windows 7 using AnyTime upgrade. You can run your fileserver and internal exchange with the license if you desire as long as you do not resell.
c) You should never bother hosting on your own licenses - that's what Hosted Exchange, traditional hosting and Azure are for. You'd end up paying for the kit anyway. If you don't use any of that tech, ignore it.
It makes financial sense when you consider the cost of a few windows and office licenses and a fileserver for a small IT business and it's 100% legitimate.
I think the gap will never close myself. I think it will hypothetically close and then thanks to net neutrality falling over and providers grabbing cash over bandwidth, we're going back to a thick client model.
It all goes in a big cycle which I've seen 2-3 times now in my life.
That works absolutely perfectly over unreliable connections and in offline mode.
It's also been around for nigh on 10-15 years now.