The world moved away from this because the internet had not taken off and the idea of portable graphical applications was in its infancy, it was too expensive on the hardware side to do it. All the moves you see to client server are showing that it was a model whos time had not come. Will it ever go back to the 80's no, thank goodness. but we will see a hybrid of the two, heck we are already seenig it.
I know they've been predicting a return to it under various names for a while, but the fact that they keep having to change the name to maintain any level of buzz shows just how little movement towards it there really is.
Are you saying there has not been a rise in the importance of web based applications over the past five years? MS has invested a good deal of time and money getting their terminal services going. in NT is was pretty much an after thought but it has matured considerably. We even see vmware esx and others (IBM P-Series) using *gasp* LPAR technology.
Look at ERP packages, how many of them are going web based? why? and why would an office suite be any different?
No, the world moved away from it because it sucked. A companies entire productivity relied on the stability of the network, with nobody able to use local storage you were one bad harddrive away from losing everything (a situation that went away, but has come back recently as harddrives have gotten too big to effectively backup, sure you've got RAID but that just means you're 2 dead drives away from the grave), it was slow, and all around it was a pain. All the "moves" I see in client server are a bunch of bluster and fluster with no real changes.
Terminal Services has been around in some form or another since NT3.51, changed names a couple of times but it's not a development of the last 5 years. Most of the "maturing" it's done is to steal features from Cytrix and undercut their market, it still doesn't have a major market share.
The reason ERP is going web is that a central repository is key to ERP. Most office stuff is written by one or two people then shared. And really ERP shouldn't be going web because the UI for web app sucks, every app (ERP or otherwise) that's gome from real client server to web based has taken a HUGE leap backward in usability.