| From: Scott Sullivan <scott@ss.org> | It used to be that you would learn the keyboard shortcuts. But as menus became | bigger, unless your work with a particular application all day, you mostly go | by mouse. (Of course I don't see this, I only see what I do, and I still use decades-old tools like X, xterm, jove, C, ...) One change I imagine is that a lot of the consumption applications have moved to totally different systems: phones and tablets. Desktops get used for real work and things that do require keyboarding. Perhaps that is actually a narrow set of applications. So I would expect keyboarding would actually become more important on desktops. The "app" world of the phone and tablet and the website world of browsers allow for a diversity of applications that the Windows and OSX world likely hasn't. In the desktop world there was some kind of tidal force that caused much functionality to end up in MS Office and a few other big hit applications. So the world with keyboards has less diversity than the touch world. The quantity of apps and websites is probably unsustainable. People cannot deal with that amount of choice, so we'll probably end up with an even more hit-driven marketplace. A counterexample: there still a heck of a lot of distinct books half a millenium after printing was invented (you can get a bunch cheap <http://stmikes.utoronto.ca/booksale/> today and tomorrow).