I absolutely agree.
Reaching the masses and keeping all of the mass content requires money, since investors are starting to realize that gazillions of views do not necesarilly equals profit, they are asking about ROI, which in turn makes the masses-reaching platforms look for ways to monetize those views, and that does not sit well with privacy caring people, but the masses don't care about that.
I really hope the masses never fill the fediverse with their nonsensical content.
Awesome! Dang, Second Life... we are definitely not so young anymore! 🤣🤣
Yep, it was my door to working at a terrestrial radio conglomerate as the IT manager and having a small technology segment on-air daily. It was good times!
For me it was ages ago (probably 2006), I was starting to learn about virtualization so I got a cheap server on ebay and started with VMWare ESX. I then virtualized Asterisk PBX and self hosted that for about 10 years, and an open source radio automation software named Rivendell Radio Automation, I self hosted 2 Internet radio stations for about 5 years since 2008, and had a small studio at home (before all the podcast kits that became very common a few years later).
I moved to the cloud for a bit while working at a big cloud provider that offered us a lot of free credits, but I'm back to having servers at home and hosting my media collection, some services my family uses and a lot of learning labs.
I use the same as you for virtuals(os-mainFunction), and similar for physical (brand-lpt/dsk/srv-mainUsage - Len-lpt-VR1, Srfc7-work, hp-srv-pve1).
I am boring like that.
I also don't name vehicles.
At this point it would not fail, it may be relegated by a newer service, like IBM and Xerox gave way to Microsoft and Apple. The big old corporations are still there, but they are not what they were in the 1980s.
Or if there was a big technology shift to something they have not yet mastered they could be made irrelevant, but still exist like Kodak.
They are too big to fail unless it is by their own failure to adapt or bad financial decisions (look at Blockbuster, Borders and Polaroid).
My take on this Cloud-First-Windows vision that was leaked from a Microsoft presentation with very little details and just a lot of speculation:
If it actually happens, it will be more similar to a Chromebook, they will provide, likely an ARM based, low specs device with a basic Windows install that perhaps only has the cloud-connector (probably RDP based), One Drive to sync files, and Edge with extensions to run Office365 in offline mode.
Apps would just be either web-wrapper based apps, or RDP Apps, or you could just deploy your cloud desktop to do some work that requires more power.
I also think they would still provide an x86_64 based Windows for more powerful PCs for content creators and gamers.
It's already being used for security audits, so it is definitely possible to use it that same way in a malicious manner.
Also, there are companies like Lakera (creators of the Gandalf prompt injection challenge) offering products to sanitize and secure LLMs, so there is a market for it, because the risks are definitely there.
And that is the problem for the commercial platforms. They don't want you to leave, they don't want you to "be done", they want you reading and engaging as much as they can because that's part of what they sell to advertisers.