Claiming that "terminals are the future once again" is hardly controversial. How much (time/money/mind share) are invested in non-networked, desktop-style apps? Some, yes, but "everyone" seem to be (continuing) the push for networked apps (MS Office and Exchange/Sharepoint, Google (everything), Adobe/Macromedia with Creative Cloud, Apple iCloud ...). Mozilla is doing a cloud-push to, but have thankfully so far had a very strong self-host, do-what-you-please story. Not sure about the Firefox OS, though -- will we be able to (easily) host our own app store? Back-end services? At least for now the things I use (Firefox sync) is easy and feasible to self-host.

The one thing I could see giving a resurgence to "off-line" for mainstream use, is latency -- more concretely -- the low latency tolerance of VR. But then again, as long as you can stream enough data/logic to the "terminal" -- even that shouldn't be a problem.

I do hope the industry can help shift things towards locally cacheable/locally hostable solutions, though. I'd much rather run some "cloud" office suite on my server, with the option of taking it with me off-line from time to time (and then perhaps sync up whenever I'm on-line) -- than having my data on a third-party server. Or servers.

I'm afraid the more likely future, is a future where a majority of users are locked-in to the whims of mega-corps -- and the scariest part of that, is that those that are leading in providing "cloud" services actually have a business model that centres around (ab)using the data, not charging for the services they provide.