Obviously absolute speculation on my part, but if they were truly doing what I suggested intentionally, part of the plan would need to be plausible deniability to avoid anti-monopoly issues, and also public sentiment nightmare. Killing your favorite shop out of incompetence doesn't win good will, but you will still go there. Doing it out of malicious intent could have people in other states joining a boycott.
I'm in management, participated in the acquisition process of the company I'm at being acquired. At least at the 150mm/year revenue level there's no one doing the shit I'm suggesting, no one is so competent. Cash on hand is bad , acquisition is an obvious way to deal with that. You're spot on about skills though, 95% of management at every level is totally incompetent at the work required to actually do management shit. All the competent people leave as soon as they can because the work just got way harder and the money doesn't follow.
Have to disagree, at least back then it was the first exposure most kids got to using a computer for work at all. Even if some of the content isn't useful for most kids, it still challenges kids to learn some basic stuff they might not otherwise. I do think it's a shame that it's required even if you already know how to do everything the course teaches, but that could be said about most classes. Everyone needs to know basic computing shit, forcing people to learn Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and some other random apps is a fine way to do that, and those apps aren't going anywhere in our lifetime, nor have they changed in a way that invalidates anything taught 20 years ago. I work with people who use a computer full time for their job and it's obvious they didn't take a basic course when they were in school 20-30 years ago, or any time since. I have nephews that are 11-15, haven't taken anything like that yet and they are totally inept with even basic shit, because it wasn't taught yet and most people don't just learn without instruction.
Your last point about usefulness to a very limited set of jobs is silly considering how much actual useless to 99% of jobs shit they teach in the core curriculum. If we didn't throw all this mostly useless shit at the whole of young society, some future great scientist, artist, mathematician, etc. would rot in ignorance, at least that's the theory. Hard to say if the American education system is working at all though.