When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2008 summers, they already had fully functional web based office which was a decade ahead of what was at Google at that time. Google is good only at pr and that's what they use their oss and surrounding efforts for
Besides, there was a time when the supposedly reasonable thing to do was to use Internet Explorer. I am glad the unreasonable people have consigned it to the waste bin, which is exactly where it belongs.
Lets call the adaptive people "Alice", like in cryptography, and use one of your examples at random: Air conditioning.
A hundred years ago, if it was too hot Alice just shrugged and didn't do anything about it. She just accepted that "It Is What It Is." Around the turn of the century, one guy, named Willis H. Carrier, decided "enough is enough, I'm going to fix this" and invented modern electric air conditioning machines. These days Alice accepts the new state of things: you can buy air conditioners, and once purchased, you can turn them on.
But lets be honest: If Alice had to use a building without air conditioning, or broken air conditioning, there's a snowball's chance in hell that she'll actually do anything about it, despite the ready availability of such devices and specialised tradespeople to fix them.
I've regularly visit a government office where 200 people have sat sweating for three years because nobody lifted a finger to I dunno... maybe see what's wrong with the aircon.
This observation exactly matches my experience of the world.
I'd love to live in your world where most people go out of their way to improve the status quo in novel ways. It would be... magical.
Incidentally, you cannot have it all: this architecture is not cheap, not fast, and isn't designed to withstand earthquakes or floods. But you'll never need air conditionning.
A few years ago I've been in an old monastery, almost daily, in both summer and winter. The summer was good, albeit with a window open. Not as good as airco, but good.
However the gas costs in winter were insane, from what I heard it was in the hundreds of thousands of EUR.
The fact that it emitted cool air was a side bonus in summer.
There are other issues with the quote. Look at where and when George Bernard Shaw lived (1856 - 1950) in the United Kingdom. The elan of the era that Shaw grew up in Britain was all about "taming" nature and "civilizing" the benighted brown people. This was the era where people went to areas that had previously been jungles and tried to have manicured British lawns. This was also the era where Great Britain tried to impose the British way of life over civilizations that were thousands of years older than it. In many ways, our world is still recovering from the effects of the "unreasonable men" that George Bernard Shaw talks about.
Google Docs had real time collaborative editing years before Microsoft.
Word online was a piece of crap for years. A decade? This is crazy talk. It's like how people call Microsoft teams good when using it is like loading pages in a Internet Explorer 6 app.
Who cares what you saw as an intern? Did they not release it because it was too good for the public?
I opened up Google Sheets and haven't looked back. I can update any spreadsheet from my phone and it's backed up on my Google Drives account. Would have given Microsoft a chance had they not been so particular about who can use their software.
I've used Excel for over a decade and am baffled by how restrictive the licensing has become.
Know many teachers?
Those sweeping statements never work; hordes of young people or ‘new computer users’ (people in poorer countries who can now afford tablets and low end laptops etc) never touched MS Office and won’t be thinking ‘where is my Excel?’ only for that reason and just complete their work in sheets.
These are often people doing production work and not kids who are playing.
Normally they have zero idea about professional project work the concept of a version controlled document is something they have never heard off
And we are talking Major Brands and Major agencies here
I was talking about having documents in source control vitally important when you may have ,multiple teams in several countries
Disclaimer: I work at Google and hate docs. But acknowledge the thing works ok for its intended user.
The collaborative features of GSuite are best in industry, some other features are so - so. I know what expert Excel users can do with it, and it's truly impressive in its domain. But if I need to do that type of stuff I reach for Python typically.