Microsoft lets it sound like fewer PCs is a good idea, especially concerning the environmental impact, but they are treating vendor dependency and gouging in a cloud like a non-issue for customers, and that a cloud outage could mean a single point of failure for businesses. Whoever buys into this must take into account that Microsoft has an increased interest in pulling all of their customers into cloud to exert power and control.
Considering even a thin client has abundant local compute power, I'm not sure where their border would lie. I use a couple Macs, all syncing data via iCloud, and a bunch of Linux machines that sync data via Dropbox (and local NFS in my home). Intermittent connection to the Internet is fine. As for corporations that are Microsoft-heavy, a lot of those are already in the single-point-of-failure point by relying on apps such as Exchange and Sharepoint, self-hosted or not.
Even the lowliest thinnest client these days has more than enough capacity and storage to be a small workstation, tapping remote services for durable storage and heavier processing needs.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 17.7 ms ] threadI'd rather use Linux because it is not as power hungry as Windows.