The primary reason you are correct about this assumption is the fact that the going trend is to package up applications and run them as a SaaS service. Those 'appliances' you are talking about will be web applications running a more highly decentralized hosting model, occasionally hosting it on the user's computer and more frequently on a neighborhood's deployment as a whole. This newer model of hosting will likely resemble true cloud compute than what we consider it today: 8-9 data centers running 80% of the public cloud in an offering called AWS.