Whisky-dave
Stories about crashed clouds are an especially hot topic these days, no matter whose cloud it is, because the issue of whether the cloud fad has staying power is a hot topic.

Mayayana
| This sort of thing has been going on for decades.

Yes, but terminals were an economic and practical necessity. PCs changed that. The new cloud trend is partly due to Internet connection improvements, but mostly it's due to profit strategies. There isn't any "hardware argument" for this new focus on cloud.

I think it's interesting to note, though, that various cloud strategies also date back a long time in the PC era. But they've mostly failed due to irrelevance. Remember the "thin client" craze around 2000? PC magazines were yapping about how everyone was going to pay twice as much for half as much computer and then use online software. Why? Who wants such a big, clunky box next to their desk when for a mere $1,000 extra they can have a sleek, mini-PC? They kept pushing the idea until it finally just faded away.

And Windows Active Desktop (1998) was basically an attempt to sell people on the idea that they were always online, and that they should want to buy stuff while they're online. Win98 had ads stuck to the Desktop, for companies such as Disney. Windows customers were invited to "subscribe" to the Disney "channel". But it was really just a bunch of ads masquerading as futuristic interconnectedness and valorized as a Bill Gates's stroke of genius. Bill's such a genius that he realized the importance of the Internet before anyone else. But of course Bill G's genius is in making a buck, so the whole Active Desktop thing was really just Microsoft's first attempt to cash in on usage of windows rather than just sales of software. The \Windows\Web folder in Win98 was full of corporate icons from companies who were hoping to get in on the ground floor of Internet advertising by having people sign up to their "channels". Presumably all those icons represented fees paid to Microsoft, which was being positioned to be the gatekeeper: Welcome to Windows 98. The Internet is BIG. We get it. Bill gets it. Here, have some ads.