"The Natural Philosopher"  wrote

| The nature of client server splitting of an application has always been
| a fine balance between the cost of processing power and the cost of
| bandwidth.
| When processing power got cheap, we lost te serial terminal and got the
| 'personal computer' . Now fibre optic is cheap and the GHz spectrum is
| open, we have the personal mobile device or a cloud connected browser in
| a desktop.

| Today's web browser equipped with Javascript IS a very smart terminal
| indeed.
|

   That has little to do with it. Companies like
Microsoft and Adobe saw a chance to change
their business from selling cars to renting taxis.
They saw how Apple gets away with extorting
money "coming and going", by gouging customers
for devices, and by gouging developers for kickbacks.

   In short, they saw that there's a lot more
money available if they can retrain the public that
computing itself is a paid service. The fast
bandwidth finally made that possible. But actually,
that self-proclaimed genius Bill Gates was trying
to do it over 20 years ago, when he tried to put
ads on the Windows desktop with Active Desktop.

  Most of these products are not even running online
or in a browser. Things like Adobe CS and Office 365
are still bloated products installed locally. It makes
no sense to run them from a server. But giving them
the appearance of running from a server, and building
them as malware that can be disabled if you don't
pay the rent, allows them to send rent bills to people.
Aside from webmail, little is actually online. They're
pulling this off just by running around yelling, "Cloud!
Cloud!". They're retraining public perception. And if they
can retrain tech insiders like yourself then I guess
they're doing a good job. :)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05