They made an observation that our industry goes in cyclical centralize/de-centralize cycles and that we we were (at the time) entering into a centralization cycle.
Now here I am reading a comment that we're going back into a de-centralization cycle and I wouldn't be surprised if you're the same poster.
probably 15-20 years ago (maybe more?) I made a prediction that I still think will come true.
The OS will become the "browser" and applications will run directly on the OS and will access local resources through standardized interfaces. WebAssembly and things like WebGL are already moving us in that direction. Honestly HTML5 was the first time I recognized standard updates as moving us towards that reality with things like localStorage, etc.
I honestly think if someone more imaginative had the helm at MS when the cloud started getting big they would have eaten google's lunch by leveraging their desktop dominance into the web. Instead they dd inane things like display websites on the desktop (win98 IIRC).
You may be right about the browser becoming the OS. Chromebooks were already a step in that direction. But JS/HTML/CSS really is a horrible combination for application programming. If the browser does become the OS, can we please get decent technology to work with?
They are bad at just being directly programmable targets.
And now we see the beginning of a migration back to client-side computation and storage.
Somehow, though, this latest iteration doesn't make a lot of sense. It's hard enough maintaining data consistency on a web service that may be used by hundreds or thousands of people. Imagine when this data is cached in microdatabases in unreliable browsers.
On top of that, the browser makes an absolutely horrible programming environment for client-side apps. For the programming part, Javascript is an poor language, so you wind up using heavy-duty frameworks like React to make it tolerable. For the UI representation, that's just not what HTML/CSS were ever meant for. So you get frameworks there as well. Young developers think this is just the way it is. No actually, it's more like the worst of all possible worlds. Using something like JavaFX or (I know, I know) even Visual Basic, you can produce a functional, robust UI with a tiny fraction of the effort.