Does that really matter? Remember, these alternatives all have a far smaller feature set, and the overlap (mostly basics) is all very similar... you don't need to relearn anything to use them if you've extensively used MS Office - you just forget 90% of what you've learned in the past and are automatically an expert user ;)

I'm not quite as PC-illiterate as you seem to think... I've been using menu keyboard shortcuts (with ALT to open the menu) for years, far before the ribbon existed ;)

The issue is that in older menu-based UIs (Office 2003, OpenOffice) the keyboard shortcuts very often lead to UIs that are no longer keyboard-navigable, or require the use of the tab key (multiple times) to navigate through a bunch of checkboxes, drop-down lists and so on. Also, many of the options don't actually have a dedicated shortcut key...

For instance: In order to change certain formatting aspects in Office 2007+, I can use keyboard shortcuts to access anything visible in the home tab of the ribbon. In Office 2003, I have to open Format=>Font (which is accessible via a keyboard shortcut, like you said), but then I need to either tab around a lot to select checkboxes and drop-down lists or just use the mouse.

Touch(e-with-a-line).

However, the ribbon has other advantages, such as making all non-dialogue functions accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Want to highlight the last word yellow (something I use a lot at work), for instance? CTRL+SHIFT+Left then ALT H I Enter. Insert a cross reference? ALT C R F.

Hell, I almost updated to Windows 8 just to get the ribbon in Explorer... :p

Do you really think it's likely MS Office will disappear any time soon? :)

Yes, schools need to teach concepts - however, this usually involves the use of actual examples, and why not make those examples relevant to current everyday work life?

It's not about the UI, but rather all the missing or more bend-over-backwards features in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice or whatever you want to call it) when compared to MS Office. In 7th grade, we were using Office 2000 or maybe XP... the basic concepts translate to 2007+ (ribbon) just fine.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, drives me crazy because I can't find many of the features that I'm looking for, or they work just slightly differently enough to be annoying...

Don't forget shopping lists (when the Tasks pane in Google Calendar won't suffice)... :)

" It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers."

I respectfully disagree. Learning to use a computer in the way that you'll very likely be using it later in college and at work is one of the few sane things about school. In "IT class" (7th grade, I think it was), we learned basic HTML, Excel (formulas, charts, little tiny intro to macro) and basic Word (headings, automatic generation of dynamic content, how to use headers and footers and all that junk) and to this day I find that stuff useful. Every time I write internal documentation of any sort, or papers, or anything else more extensive than a one-page letter, it's great to simply be "fluent" in Office instead of having to Google the more advanced stuff (something I see my coworkers doing a lot)...

Interesting, what do you mean by more demanding resolutions? I haven't had any problems whatsoever with good old 1080p source material, even when playing back on high-res displays (2560x1600) with rather old hardware.

Are you playing 4k or 8k something else insane? Have you checked your CPU load? Activated HWA decoding?

... and focus on finishing the Android version.

Sorry if I'm being dense but... Click where? Sure, clicking and dragging down is easy, but how the hell are you supposed to know that? Not everyone reads Slashdot :-P

I've been playing around with Windows 8 on and off for weeks now (with a keyboard, mind you), and I didn't know anything about click-and-drag-down for closing apps...

Except that just typing what you want is broken in Windows 8. Anything other than app names requires extra keystrokes or clicks to switch categories... example: typing background and pressing enter takes you to the desktop background settings on Win7. Windows 8 just gives you no search results... it's the same for all the other control panel tasks that worked fine in Windows 7...

I'm sticking with Windows 7 for this reason alone... have Win8 pro 64bit running in a VM too, but it usually only takes me about half a minute to get to the point where I want to throw the laptop out the Window and switch back to 7.

Don't get me wrong - Windows 8 is great, but only on tablets...

Now why would you want to keep that upgrade treadmill running? I for one quite enjoy the fact that I can play many of the latest games on a $100 video card and can focus on efficiency (just bought a Radeon 7750, which doesn't even need an additional power connector) instead of brute force... And the games look great. Does Battlefield 3 (the first PC game I've played that nearly *requires* a quad-core to run well) really look better than, say, Call of Duty MW3? MW3 feels like it needs about half the processing power that BF3 does, but visually, the difference is pretty minimal.

Am I missing something big here? Hell, I must be... I'm still gaming on a Core 2 Quad :p

What I consider a usable laptop? At bare minimum, Core i3 level horsepower backed up by at least 4 gigs of RAM and a real SATA(3) SSD. Which is, in terms of perceived speed, about 100x the power of the proposed design, even for basic internet and office use.

USB 3.0? It's an ARM based design that uses a SD card for storage... how are you going to saturate even USB 2.0?

And here I was, all excited, thinking someone had designed their own *laptop* and not an oversized clamshell smartphone... :(

Is your IT staff mostly on touchscreen devices? Or do I detect a faint whiff of masochism? :p