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A portion of college students rely on MS Office heavily, especially those majoring in Business, Accounting, Economics.

Project Managers and Business Analysts are another category of people who rely on MS Office heavily as well.

Programmers may not.

I do not disagree, engineers need CAD tools or simulators, architects the same. Take all the professional people and put them in the category "Need a computer for their job." Now create another group called "Don't need a computer for their job." Compare the sizes of the two groups.

I don't think anyone expects that general purpose personal computers are ever going away, but there is a pretty compelling argument that the bulk of computational assets will fall into the 'appliance' category rather than the 'general purpose' category.

As Atwood points out, Microsoft strove to have a PC in every house, and they succeeded! PCs have higher penetration in homes than TVs. However, given tablets and their capabilities, it is looking more and more likely that this trend will stop and that the number of homes without a PC in them will begin to rise again. its an open question how many homes that will be but it seems likely it will happen.

They do, but they don't have to. Some careers are notoriously averse to evolving technology - I still see HP-12C calculators around the office because many of its users refuse to learn anything newer - and business and accounting are two of them.

There is little stopping them from using newer tools but inertia.

What would be the alternatives for the group of people I mentioned above?

For writing, almost anything. For spreadsheets, unless you need Excel plugins, again, almost anything. For project management? There are a good couple tools around.

They don't need Office. They are just used to it, much like accountants are used to their 12C's

The problem here you see is that people don't want to spend time learning computers if they can avoid it except for browsing.

Now most students are being trained to use Office at school.

I use to see the world from an "Open Source" programmer's point of view: "You have the choice to use OpenOffice". But then after I saw the reality for a while, things start to sink in and it becomes obvious that people don't want to be liberated the way I thought they ought to be.

People are OK with MS Office. It becomes a piece of software that, no matter how hard geeks want to argue about the Pareto Principle or not, will stood the test because people were being trained regardless its complexity.

So yeah, from "feature/functionality" perspective, there are alternative. But from skill-wise, willing-to-learn aspect, there aren't until Universities and/or schools start teaching young people to use something else.

OTOH another argument is: you don't need the other alternatives if you have Office.

Well... Tablets are kind of changing that. We'll see in a couple years if students will insist on carrying their notebooks running Windows.

Even if they won't do that, they'll go to their lab to do the must-do assignments using MS Office for certain type of assignments.

A person close to me is currently taking Accounting courses and calculator + paper do not cut it. You need Excel.

No. You need a spreadsheet. Excel is just the most popular one, much like the 12C is the most popular business-oriented pocket calculator.

That's because they're exactly what a competent finance person needs for conversational analysis. Spreadsheets have their place but if you cannot talk without a keyboard you are way too deep in the numbers. And the batteries never die, at 3am on day 3 of due diligence in Toledo your phone and its finance app will be dead but that 12C will still be cranking out present values, amort schedules, target return rates and IRR. Those calculators are maybe the most fit-for-purpose white collar tool I've ever seen.

EDIT: I don't care for MSFT, I loathe Word. But Excel on Windows is a genuinely fine tool -- overused by a lot of people b/c the Windows anti-pattern keeps them from proper tools, but still a really useful piece of work. You can't do detailed modern financial analysis without it. The alternatives -- Linux, Google Docs, even Excel on Mac -- aren't even close.

I'm OK with pocket calculators. What I find weird is that inertia has kept the 12c being produced long after it became a relic. There are many other business-oriented pocket calculators out there with much nicer and efficient interfaces than the 12C.

What some courses teach is not financial math - it's "how to get numbers out of a 12C". This is just perverse.

I know your use cases may ignore it, but Excel, from what I've seen is unmatched. There are things you can do in it that are either difficult to do in other spreadsheet apps or require a database.

It's limitations are outweighed by how fast you can do cut and dice data, including pivot tables (ie, basic OLAP). Google Docs is still too limited (ie, try filtering and sorting on multiple columns).

If you know of a way I can do this in a desktop or web-app for the entry price of Excel (free would be nice, but I don't mind paying), I'd be happy to know.

You're missing the point. You are on Hacker News, you will probably care about such things. My mom doesn't care if you can't filter and sort on multiple columns. She cares if the thing is easy to use and portable, which the iPad wins hands down over a PC.

There are a lot of users between "your mom" and HN readers, many of them probably use things like pivot tables.

Way too small, requires a fidgety external keyboard... tablets don't look good for general office use, especially when compared to ultrabooks -- the real future of office computing IMHO. Why should I waste my time attaching/detaching/packing a tablet and an external keyboard, when I can just close the screen and be on my way? And all this trouble just to get... a screen smaller than 20-year-old monitors? Most office people don't care about screen resolution; if I had a penny for every monitor I've seen running at resolutions much lower than what the hardware could deal with, I'd be closing in on Warren Buffett. They want BIG LETTERS and LOTS OF SPACE, and don't care how it's achieved.

Tablets are good for certain use-cases, but when it comes to typing to save your life (i.e. your business), they are simply not a match and will likely never be. Couple that with the small screen real estate (spreadsheets these days are enormous), and you see how the iPad can be taken seriously only by the detached upper echelons who play golf all day. The rank-and-file will keep asking for (lighter) laptops forever more.

Bold statement. Keep in mind lots of us were balking at the idea of touch screens for even writing text messages when the iPhone came out.. Or jump back less than a lifetime to assumptions about how long it would take to get computers the size of our bedrooms.

Take a step back, and really consider how likely it is that laptops are FOREVER. It might be true, but things change and I think it's historically much more likely that ANYTHING you point a finger at today will be transformatively replaced in due time, than it is that you'll be able to accurately predict a permanent future for whatever an ultrabook is.

I actually don't have any idea what an ultrabook is, but it sounds like a very small idea... not something I'd bet on or invest in for the very long term.

I still hate writing on a touchscreen. It's slow and error-prone. It's only better than not writing at all.

Touchscreens are fundamentally limited by the size of your finger. Firstly because you have to physically press the UI element you want to interact with. Secondly because your finger obscures whatever's underneath.

Of course, you can get around this by decoupling the physical location of the UI element and the physical location of your finger. It's called a trackpad.

Touchscreens are great for some tasks. But they are not great for tasks involving high information densities (writing, spreadsheets, mostly anything that can be classified as "editing"). For those, people will continue to use keyboards and mice until they evolve cone-shaped transparent fingers.

But interestingly, the touch keyboard does suck very badly. It's only because of other factors that I accept the "touch keyboard." But in reality, it's very, very annoying, let's be honest. Pre-iPhone, I texted happily without even looking at the screen. Now, I can never figure out why I keep hitting certain letters that I didn't mean to. I feel like an elderly person typing. And you can google this stuff, it's a very common view. We haven't really innovated with a touch keyboard, we just deal with it. If I had a technology that could let me have a touch experience but give me a tactile keyboard when I need, it would be great. Although, I agree with you on the ultrabook thing, not sure about that.

Ultrabooks are MacBookAir-like laptops. Technically the term is an Intel trademark, but it's a widely-accepted synonym for "very thin and light laptop with extra battery life and no optical-disc bay".

As soon as they start to get over the 11-to-13'' form factor (and lower in price), they're going to replace the current generation of work laptops. They'll get thinner and thinner; as batteries and bluetooth-like technologies improve, sooner or later they'll even lose USB ports, and you'll be left with a device that is literally a screen and a keyboard. Some models will have a detachable tablet screen, no doubt, but the heavy lifting will still be done with a real keyboard.

I don't know. What happens when you can dictate your documents? That and gestures and the occasional keyboard might go a very long way.

I don't think it will change tomorrow. But I could see the home market making the shift, gradually. Where the business market will be fifteen years from now we'll have to see.

Two futures:

1. Every office in the world will buy each employee a separate office room so they can dictate their documents without being disturbed by the other employees.

2. Every office in the world will buy each employee a $10 physical keyboard.

3. Every employee works from a room in their house.

But we were talking about real scenarios. :) Seriously though, there are practical, life reasons, why that would be unlikely to be the 90% case.

I don't think folks will do all their work from home, but I think it will increase quite a bit for professional workers over the next 20 years -- mostly because space is expensive, and working from home is desirable for many people.

I wonder what this will do to the divorce rate.

Surprised I got down-voted. It's kind of naive. Many programmers that have families prefer to go to work instead. Working at home, as a non-bachelor, you're seen as being able to take care of all the domestic issues (dishes, trash, run errands) and many people would just rather strike that balance. Sure, a lot of people like it but I don't think it's going to be that common. Even our industry, supposedly the most forward thinking, and even in SV, many require working on-premise. If working from home is too liberal for SV, it's going to be too much for the rest of the country for much longer than 20 years.

Well, I didn't down-vote you and I have a family, but my wife worked from home for quite a while and liked it. I think it would be tough when the kids are little, but when they are older it would work fine.

I don't think most folks would end up working from home 5 days a week -- there are still things that work better face-to-face. But I could see folks _only_ coming in for face-to-face time.

Nope. I don't really see any evidence that we are creating less "word processed" documents than we did pre-iPad.