At least for consumer devices, I think the 'primordial soup' spark of motivation was the original lean and mean netbooks (with the initial push to web apps over

At least for consumer devices, I think the 'primordial soup' spark of motivation was the original lean and mean netbooks (with the initial push to web apps over running full clients locally, before they became low spec windows laptops), with compact flash ATA adapters to displace HDDs. Power consumption was a factor as well IIRC