I can't see it being a thing on the consumer end, so it has to be enterprise.
The problem it'll face being marketed to consumers is that every one of the big JS application sites has already deployed a mobile app that takes care of the "works on light hardware" part.
For the ad-laden, tracker-heavy news sites of the world, there are ad-blocker extensions and Brave.
Independent professionals that have to use a heavy site will opt to upgrade their spec, almost certainly; computer financing has made it so that you can pay $30-50 a month to get a whole new system - why would you pay to get a worse experience?
Now, the enterprise can afford to spend on this and it can even solve some major problems. But that's a "current enterprise" problem, and not where I see tomorrow's enterprise going. There will always be startups aiming to be savvier than this, cut out more fat and not get locked into this particular opex and security model. The basic premise relies on the Web keeping its dominant state and I suspect we're in the midst of a trend reversal against centralized systems.
And...if the current enterprise doesn't provision correctly, it's likely they'll just continue to do so and leave their employees to suffer with 2Gb laptops, because it hasn't become mission critical yet.
So, I really do suspect that while it might have a chance for a few years, it's in a race against time to get some market share and expand differentiating factors. In this respect it could have the success of a Dropbox, i.e. "get big, then run out of places to go".
All they need is to get a few large companies on board, and then to convince Web developers that it's no longer necessary to think at all about front-end performance. The rest of us will be forced to follow suit when a critical mass of Web sites require beefier hardware than we can afford to buy ourselves, and faster connections than we can even get access to due to Comcast and Time Warner not giving a shit about speed.
I believe it's possible to be very interested in business and money and still end up with an ethically credible result.
The problem is that we(in the broader sense of the working world) don't treat those concepts as an "artistic medium" to which additional principles and ideas are needed to structure and shape the outcomes, rather, we just use them as scorekeeping for a nebulous measure of life success, which results in founders laboring hard over the business equivalent of a fart joke, because they're only aiming to min-max response for effort.
The measure of what's an "impactful" business is socially constructed within the arbitrage of what we could potentially strive for against what societal conditions currently allow. Entrepreneurs, as a group, are always testing the boundaries of that arbitrage. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's hard to find balance in the arrangement because they aren't able to do their study in private: part of the deal is that they demand access to significant resources to make it happen, and that occasional violations get overlooked in the name of progress. In a time like now when the population is mostly asking for relief measures, it looks indulgent, and sometimes it is.
I suggest floor sitting, a lap desk, and whatever screen mounting solution works for you.
The trick of floor sitting is that you can make drastic postural shifts throughout the day. It's a natural way to get in a stretch. So it's the better way to sit if you find yourself squirming and uncomfortable. All you need to do desk work on the floor is a way to put the screen at a comfortable height, and a lap desk - a large one with padding will rest easily in many configurations. If you need back support there are floor chairs; I have one and use it sometimes, but not always.
The problem it'll face being marketed to consumers is that every one of the big JS application sites has already deployed a mobile app that takes care of the "works on light hardware" part.
For the ad-laden, tracker-heavy news sites of the world, there are ad-blocker extensions and Brave.
Independent professionals that have to use a heavy site will opt to upgrade their spec, almost certainly; computer financing has made it so that you can pay $30-50 a month to get a whole new system - why would you pay to get a worse experience?
Now, the enterprise can afford to spend on this and it can even solve some major problems. But that's a "current enterprise" problem, and not where I see tomorrow's enterprise going. There will always be startups aiming to be savvier than this, cut out more fat and not get locked into this particular opex and security model. The basic premise relies on the Web keeping its dominant state and I suspect we're in the midst of a trend reversal against centralized systems.
And...if the current enterprise doesn't provision correctly, it's likely they'll just continue to do so and leave their employees to suffer with 2Gb laptops, because it hasn't become mission critical yet.
So, I really do suspect that while it might have a chance for a few years, it's in a race against time to get some market share and expand differentiating factors. In this respect it could have the success of a Dropbox, i.e. "get big, then run out of places to go".