Dumb terminals were transformed into intelligent desktop machines that could store applications and data. The glass house populated by white-smocked technicians went out of fashion. Looking back on those times, many of us would shake our heads and wonder how IBM could have been so wrong. But maybe Big Blue wasn't so far off. Thanks to the advent of application service providers, centralized computing is making a comeback.
ASPs offer centralized application management.
The market started as a way to offer the benefits of Server Advertisement Protocol and other complex enterprise resource planning software to small companies or companies with less technical savvy. But ASPs now host all kinds of applications, including small, multilicensed programs whose images are downloaded to end users on demand. To be fair, the dynamics of an ASP are very different from old centralized mainframe operations. An ASP doesn't just host and support an application for general distribution over an in-house proprietary network. Unlike the IBM vision, an ASP is very dependent on network service.