Distributed networks, at least in the 90s, were meant to deal with infrastructure problems. Rob Pikes various writing on Plan9 reflect this. They needed quick access to data over slow networks, while pushing most of the processing onto remote machines and in order to cut costs and particularly of purchasing and maintaining, in bell labs case, 30,000 individual machines. The WORM was just a security measure to enhance data integrity because it could only be written once.

The cloud OS that ((( they ))) want serves none of these purposes. It's about control and data collection.