"But the back-and-forth was technologically complicated, and it came with a catch: It required a piece of additional software, or “plugin,” known as ActiveX — which is also made by Microsoft and worked in tandem only with Internet Explorer."
That phrasing made me cringe and shows the lack of technical understanding of the author of this article. ActiveX is a technology, not a piece of software or a plugin in itself.
I think even for the casual user there are a still a lot of use-cases in favor of a PC. Basically anything to do with managing large amount of content like photos, music or even fairly light content creation like writing long emails is much easier to do on a computer with a larger screen and mouse/keyboard.
I think "Bildschirmtext" was a similar service that launched around the same time in Germany and also foreshadowed a lot of what the internet is now. Online shopping, forums, real time messaging, online dating, etc.
The requirement was only that the console had to be connected to the internet once every 24 hours so I don't think that impacts their cloud efforts one way or another.
Not being able to play games without the disc in the tray is a major downside of the new policy though. Of course at least for me that means I will buy all Xbox One games digital going forward.
It feels to me though that google is still playing serious catch-up to it's main competitors (yahoo & microsoft) in the email arena who both have great web-mail solutions that don't get the accolades they deserve.
Now all I need is full folder support and I'm happy!
Let me join in the chorus of people that are slightly miffed that I don't have access to my Trello boards. In a way it highlights again the importance of local storage and off-line accessibility for web-apps. I just checked and in the trello app on my nexus 7 I can still see (and browse) all my boards for example (the only problem is that the content is a few days old as I have not used the app recently)