When you're forced online, you become less resistant to products and services being fed from the cloud, then computers can be produced cheaply with less storage and resources, and almost everyone will end up running dumb terminals. It doesn't happen overnight, but more and more people would rather buy a 150 bucks PC plus pay per use services rather than a 250 one that can host and run installed software, then the market would do the rest by making real computers more expensive as they transition to niche products.
I'd rather start familiarizing with open and less intrusive operating systems.