How about market saturation?
Maybe the government will mandate a change that makes all the hundreds of millions of perfectly usable PCs obsolete as was done with TV ?
Will obama offer “cash for clunker computers” so millions of usable PCs are scrapped to benefit Chinese factories and American resellers?
The non-graphic email needs were met with computers of the 80s.
I seriously think few PC users tap a tenth of the current machines potential yet everyone is forced to continually “upgrade” to keep the gamers,show-off programmers, and advertisers happy.
If it wasn’t for all the ad spyware,pushware ads,and other crap my old iMac Lime or Windows 98SE or Me would do fine for my internet use and ,I strongly suspect,that of many others.Certainly MacOS 10.4 Tiger with multiple participant video conferencing built in should suffice!. We had video clips then ;HTML5 isn’t needed just to see a video of someone reading the news or anything else.It is just constant,forced,planned, and totally UNNECCESSARY obsolescence designed to keep the treadmill going.
If these improvements actually made things better and easier I would be much happier.I have had to retire a number of PCs from internet use only because the websites stopped supporting the browser that would run on the OS of those machines,yet what I see on those websites is practically the same as before.
Sounds like a job for linux !