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.