Back in the mid 90's Larry Ellison said, "we need computers that do less, not more". He was widely ridiculed at that time. Now we know he was right.
The origins of VNC are an AT&T project where people would wear RFC tags, walk up to any workstation and have their session. This was long before Ellison was talking about Network Computers. There is also John Gage from Sun's motto, "the network is the computer."
The real lesson, I think, is that most people don't want to _manage_ devices. They don't want to deal with backups, they don't want to manage disks, filesystems and drivers, and if you can take all of that away they'll be happy to store all their documents in your cloud.
For business, it depends.
I think my company is fairly typical in that we offer fully managed systems but don't require that people go that route. (But you're more or less on your own for support if you choose to self-manage.)