Although I visited an old site I used to work out not so long ago and found things very much changed.
All the Solaris servers were gone to be replaced by... Linux although to be fair it was a commercial flavour.
All the desktop sparks were gone to be replaced by linux deskyops and MS laptops. There were loads of terminal servers doing database stuff.
The enterprise exchange system which had been the bane of my life at times had been punted and it was back to using sendmail on the nix systems with IMAP.
It all looked rather shoddy to me and certainly not what you would have expected in a blue chip companys server room.
The common trait to all of these actions is an obvious, ill-informed, and greedy attempt to save money by any means conceivable. Unfortunately, any apparent savings in the short term will be offset by much higher costs in the long term. However, even accountants sometimes don't see the forest because of the trees, and may not realize that higher costs could be the result of penny-pinching decisions made years earlier.
None of the changes you describe has any real technical justification. The use of terminal servers is especially irresponsible, although I've seen it often enough. In the old days, that was called "timesharing," but timesharing worked much better than terminal servers.
I'll inform my successful small business (mostly Linux, 2 Macs) immediately!
You can get away with all sorts of things in a small business, including many unconventional IT policies (except a lack of backups, which can be fatal to any business). When you are managing 60,000 desktops in 100 countries, however, the rules change.