I'm sure there's an odd parable with netbooks, around the time they first started appearing as a hacky project and early commercial products they were lean and mean. Lightweight local software to do things online, compact flash IDE converters versus HDDs (which seems like a precursor to SSDs by proving a market), bare bones linux and there was a new wave of web standards and performance which non-IE browsers were leading in.
Then after going mass market OEMs put full windows and client software on there, and the web became heavier so webmail or simple office/collaboration slowed down. After that mobile/tablets were in competition for the market, and has practically devoured non-professional usage for PCs outside of gaming.
What I keep coming back to is bundling versus unbundling - having one tool to do everything with likely inevitable compromises, versus splitting into a number of precise specialized ones. It's difficult to convince any decent number of people to take something that does less.
Then after going mass market OEMs put full windows and client software on there, and the web became heavier so webmail or simple office/collaboration slowed down. After that mobile/tablets were in competition for the market, and has practically devoured non-professional usage for PCs outside of gaming.
What I keep coming back to is bundling versus unbundling - having one tool to do everything with likely inevitable compromises, versus splitting into a number of precise specialized ones. It's difficult to convince any decent number of people to take something that does less.