Death of a fontman

What I recently started noticing is the slow death of serif fonts in our life as writers. Actually, "writing" now means "typing" using the keyboard. The major tools for typing nowadays are:

• Web (forums like this, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• Email
• MS Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)

How many of them use serif fonts such as Times New Roman as the default typeface? One: MS Word. All the rest uses sans serif fonts such as Arial by default. From my experience, we seldom change the default typeface, and if it happens, serif fonts are replaced by sans serif fonts, not the other way around.

Word was once THE tool for creating documents, but as our writing tools shifts into web-based applications, I am seeing less Word-based documents. As I recall, I have only written once in Word in the last 5 days or so.

If this trend continues (and spills over to the reading world, which is already happening thanks to our leaving paper-based publications), will serif fonts turn into decorative fonts, like - er - comic sans?