[hinkley]

I was fighting my coworkers with 1440 monitors to make sure we still worked on 768 width (plenty for 800px + scrollbar, or portrait on the brand new iPad). UI people like to maximize negative space in their mockups and it's not uncommon for them to use extremely short example text to emphasize that effect. Like how your living room looked so big until you put all of your crap into it.

And the thing is, even if you had a 16XX monitor, who wants to maximize a tool that you might be transcribing data in or out of? I might actually need two windows side by side to facilitate that work.