The Death of the PC has been predicted many times. I can believe that the modern surge of high-powered phones and tablets will displace laptops, but general purpose computing workstations? Engineers and scientists need lots of computrons in close communication with local high-speed storage and graphics hardware, so consequently there will always be a stream of low-to-mid-range server technology feeding into general purpose computing workstations, and so there will always be something for hobbyists. I suspect that any significant regulatory forcing in this ecology would affect scientific and engineering innovation to such a degree that any nation implementing draconian technology restrictions would soon find itself at the bottom of the heap. Those who allow free technology will define the next generation.

When you consider the utter mess we're making of this planet, reduced shipping capacity isn't that bad of a thing to accept.

Actually, it is a bad thing to accept. If products could be created with less work (e.g. energy and consequently pollution) using local capital and labor, then we wouldn't be shipping them in the first place. Displacing the labor from an efficient location to a less efficient location will have costs, and some those costs will be environmental.

Prior art:

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/ig/20-Years-of-Photoshop/Photoshop-Elements-1-0-2001.htm

Button and menu controls on the palettes, tabs to switch between control palettes, all of it. Just 'cause the Ribbon is blue doesn't make it new.

How is The Ribbon (trademark, whatever) different from the palettes in Adobe creative products that have been there since the early 90s, or the tool palettes any number of programs? The main difference seems to be that the Ribbon can't be moved or resized like those palettes, and its controls cannot be customized or changed.

Honestly, I don't see anything here that is conceptually different from, say, Superpaint circa 1990, or MacDraw Pro, or... sheesh. They all had dockable tool palettes with a combination of buttons, menus, and dialog box poppers. If you want fixed palettes of controls, go to (for example) Adobe Photodeluxe circa 2001.

I mean, I give credit to MS for realizing that menu bars were an early 90s solution to the problem of organizing software functionality, and a palette arrangement could expose more functionality on new displays with more pixel space. But others had come to that conclusion much earlier, and the fixed palette they call "The Ribbon" does not have new features that you would not find in any number applications that use tool palettes.

I see students failing papers because the Word on one machine does not read word files created on another machine in a different version.

I have to call FUD on that -- Word 2007 will read file formats from before those students were born. If they are claiming that Word ate their homework, they are lying.

Microsoft has locked out some older file formats, such as PowerPoint before Office 97, because they don't want to maintain security on the conversion code. Organizations with long memories (like the company I work for) have bumped into that issue.

... because you only have to use Google Docs for about 2 minutes to run into commonly-used features from Microsoft Office that just don't exist. I create a chart and I can't format the axes, I can't put in a trend line, I can't copy and paste it into a document. The drawing tools are laughably unsophisticated. Google Docs doesn't offer feature parity with a 1993 copy of Clarisworks, much less Microsoft Office.

I like Google Docs as a handy scratchpad to create documents accessible from anywhere and quickly exportable as PDFs. I have dozens of little things transcribed in it. But production work has to meet standards for fonts, formatting, chart appearance, etc that Google Docs cannot produce. The reality is that Office + Exchange + Sharepoint offers a collaboration environment that is unmatched -- it's an expensive combination, but if you need the features, there is no competitive option. Google's services are light years behind, and OpenOffice is not bad at all (and tantalizingly better than Office in a handful of areas) but the collaboration features are not there.