Wide screen computer monitors!

I really don't understand these at all!  My old monitor started producing the smell of burnt electronics on Friday night and only able to display for 3 seconds at a time before going blank - so it was time to visit the computer store for a new monitor.  Now all I wanted was more or less the same as I've got, a 19" monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio, but no can do, I've got to have a ludicrously wide screen instead (unless I want to pay a small fortune that is).  Now to me, these just look plain stupid on the desk and actually don't work with the majority of things I want to 'display'.

Why 4:3, well more to the point, why do I need a wide-screen monitor?  I don't watch movies on the PC, I've got a TV or projector for that!  What I do use my PC for is photographic work, word documents...and so on - all of which are awful when on a wide-screen display.  To get a reasonable amount of displayed 'height' (in line with my old 19" 4:3) I've ended up with a 23" wide-screen monitor and as I type in this entry 50% of the screen is totally wasted with nothing being displayed at all - just a central portion actually being worked on.  Word documents with 2 pages at a time displayed, no not really, Excel is quite nice for wide data sets as is working with complex SQL scripts, but thats the stuff I do at work.

So it does beg the question 'who' decided we all need wide screen monitors?  Could it perhaps be that screen producers who probable supply both TV & computer monitors just decided that it was better for them to stick to a standard format to reduce production costs and not really worry too much about consumer choice?  After all, we do all tend to be a bit sheep like in accepting the easy options these days - well I certainly did, need a monitor quickly so bought what was on offer, but can't say I'm really too happy about it.