Well, the Sun vision was that everyone could remote to a workstation in the cloud using a very cheap almost brainless terminal that understood card based SSO, b

Well, the Sun vision was that everyone could remote to a workstation in the cloud using a very cheap almost brainless terminal that understood card based SSO, but that workstation you saw was using the standard UNIX desktop environment with filing systems, clipboards, command lines etc. What we've got now is almost the reverse: we pay for quite expensive machines that have those things and then remote the app UI backwards. The server spends relatively little resources on our requests and doesn't think in terms of pixels at all, whilst our machines spend a lot of resources doing graphical heavy lifting. And instead of all the user's data being brought together in one place (the file system) it's all scattered in different databases the users don't have access to.