What makes this different is the availability of bandwidth. Back in 1993 we didn't have 20 megabit connections available pretty much everywhere. Without that running a thin client was going to be painful.

Businesses will like this because they pay less for hardware and can scale up and down a lot faster. No more will there be rooms full of defunct machines, long periods of time between upgrades. They can scale personal machines on the fly and will have much lower electricity costs.

I've been using a cloud gaming platform for a few years now and it's really nice that upgrading my graphics card is just like resizing an EC2 instance. You need a solid internet connection and low latency to the datacenter but it works really well. It's great being able to play games with full graphics on my laptop without burning my nuts.

However, you're right that this can all happen in a web browser. But that's an advantage for Microsoft, because they can sell the service to people on their existing hardware, lowering barrier to entry.

These boxes will be sold as loss leaders and practically given away. Which will be great because I'm sure they're powerful enough to run pihole and maybe a few services.