They did talk about more and more people using a computer as a window to the internet, but didn't talk about how much more efficient the software powering that window had become. Apple launched Safari in 2003 and Chrome/V8 was released in 2008. So even as we've wanted our web apps to do more, the engines running them have gotten so much better.
When most software that people were using was being written in C/C++, an increase in the amount of work the program wanted to do needed to be matched by an increase in performance. Compilers have gotten better, but nothing near the impact that modern web browsers have had. So older computers have benefitted from a huge increase in browser performance (the browser being the thing executing most "applications") over the past decade in a way that we never really saw in previous computing generations.