Yep, this is 100% it. In some ways it's unfortunate -- we had some great desktop software in the 1990s and 2000s that was really effective. In the move to the cloud, a lot of software has been re-engineered for the browser, with massively greater constraints. I can't believe that Google Docs still doesn't have the feature-richness of Microsoft Word 2007 or even 2003. Browser-based image editing software is generally not nearly as powerful as the Adobe CC suite circa 2010. We're re-engineering inferior software for the browser all the time, with the only difference being collaboration and platform independence -- which, admittedly, is huge. So I'm not surprised that you saw this first-hand 25 years ago. It feels like developers (myself included) are perpetually rediscovering the same design principles and products as the underlying computing platforms evolve.