"Google Stadia is not a product that exists because people want it"

Longevity is certainly not overrated, at least for me. Just yesterday i was playing Morrowind, a game released almost two decades ago and a few months before i was doing my 9th playthrough of Fallout New Vegas - not long after my 6th playthrough of Vampire - The Masquerade: Bloodlines. All these are games that i have played many times over many years and have benefited tremendously from users having complete control over their computers and the files to mod them and fix them so they become the classics they are today. If anything, just VtmB alone is a great case of how much you can not rely on the official channels for support but also how much the community - thanks to having such control - can address the issues and give the game the attention it deserves. These are games i have played and had fun for years.

Of course these are just the more known ones. I have played (and even fixed myself) and had fun with games that have been forgotten by their own developers for many years now. I actively try to find lesser known and/or lesser well received older games - i spent several days playing something like Excalibur 2555AD, a clunky and mediocre game for most, yet i had fun exploring its weird dungeons and even weirder enemy designs that look like they escaped from some early 90s British comic).

None of that stuff would be possible with something like Stadia. All of those would be long gone, broken for all their short lifetime which would end to make space for the newest overhyped release and some of them - like Excalibur 2555AD - would barely exist for more than a few months after their failure.

It's a matter of degree, depending on the whims of the market and dedication of the emulator scene. Not all old movies or games are available. Not all art has survived. And apparently the old World of Warcraft is back?

I dunno about this. My dad was a research chemist and when I was a kid I would occasionally go into the office and check out the computer. They were all using Unix workstations (Solaris I believe) and seemed to get their work done fine. There was Lotus Notes, there was NCSA Mosaic... all the things you do with your computer today, they did with Unix 25 years ago. My dad wasn't a programmer and neither were his lab-mates. That was just how computers were then. This was not 2004, though, this was like 1995. But I was 10 and figured it out with 10 minutes of screwing around on "take your kid to work day", so maybe it wasn't so complicated that no mere mortal could ever hope to compute in that environment.

I agree that office suites circa 2004 were bad. I used Linux all throughout high school and never liked Abiword or the competition (I guess OpenOffice might have been a thing back then). I learned LaTeX and used that. Looking back, I don't think I would have liked Microsoft Word, either. WYSIWYG was a big deal back then, but I didn't really care what I got. (I ended up tweaking LaTeX to double-space and use thin margins to look like Word, since teachers demanded it. I personally didn't care; whatever Knuth decided looked good, I was fine with.)

Using Unix or Linux back then was really liberating. I remember that if you wanted to learn C or C++ on DOS/Windows/Mac at the time, you had to spend hundreds of dollars on an IDE (Borland C++? Visual C++? I don't really remember.) Or you could just install Linux, and it was all free. Sure, Emacs had some warts, and wasn't really integrated with GCC... but if you were willing to push through, you could do your homework at home, while your classmates had to stay in the computer lab and do it.

I dunno, I don't think it was all that bad. We ended up using the "software runs on a server" model anyway, with web apps. You open Google Docs to type something and if your computer blows up, no worries, you can just keep working from another computer. Very much like the Sun smartcard-based system the author describes, just with more "material design" instead of "some UNIX geeks were excited they figured out how to draw shadows efficiently." What's old is new. Not much has REALLY changed.