The fine article plainly says that these are for corporate use and that the service it is meant to connect to isn't even available to regular consumers. And this is hardly a new concept: even a casual search shows that Windows thin clients have existed since the '90s and that the previous models are still currently being sold by various OEMs.

Yes, exactly, this is the same old "how do we prevent lowly employees from going on facebook and solitaire" technology many other companies have tried 1000 times before.

Always runs stuck on 3 problems:

1) this attitude makes these machines a reverse status symbol. I mean if you work at a company and work on one of these it essentially means you're low status. It's just shy of a slave collar. So everyone fights to the death not to have one of these.

(this was imho also a problem of Google Stadia. It worked ... but an xbox was better. It worked, but a PC was better. It worked ... but a PS5 was better. Not because they were actually better, but because they were fundamentally superior status symbols. Stadia meant you were cheap/poor)

2) for any even remotely creative work you need access to so much of the internet, and a web browser. Which then defeats the purpose because of course facebook (or rather the 10.000 ad-supported sites) have an extreme incentive to make themselves available. So solitaire (whatever the modern version) is available.

3) management has their little favorite solution and configuration. IT has their little favorite adaptations. Security has ... and so on. So fixing even the tiniest of incompatibilities is a 5 year project that requires 5 departments getting involved, that nobody wants to do.

Microsoft has always resisted doing this, with citrix picking up the slack, but looks like they'll give it another shot.