There are 2 main issues with this - latency and software innovation. And they are related. The first issue is latency. Information can only be transmitted as f

There are 2 main issues with this - latency and software innovation. And they are related. The first issue is latency. Information can only be transmitted as fast as the speed of light. Thus for a given distance - there is a hard lower limit on latency. The second issue is software innovation. People are constantly coming up with new ways to use computing power - and often latency is a big deal. Take for example shell vs GUI. If you are just typing commands in a line oriented manner, a dumb terminal works great. If you try to run Excel fully remotely with a round trip every time you edit a cell - you will go crazy. Another example will be artificial intelligence. A lot of the algorithms are compute intensive. As AI becomes more prevalent and more used by people, an experience that has a lower latency will become an advantage. To achieve this - more computing will need to be done on the device to avoid server round-trip latencies. If you look at the history of computing, it seems that just about the time when everybody seems assured that centralized servers with dumb terminals will win the day - some new innovation comes that tips the balance towards powerful devices. I suspect it will be this way again.