I'm a firm believer in negativity breeding negative results. Case in point, the economy. Unjustly compared to their dotcom predecessors, ASPs are more than just ordering merchandise and getting the presents in time for Christmas.
ASPs provide a combination of networking, hosting, and application software.
Despite the negative press, some ASPs are achieving impressive success. Call me a Darwinist, but ASPs are simply the next step in the evolution of personal computing. In the early 80s, Wang and Xerox dominated personal computing, and the industry was resplendent with timeshares of huge mainframes and dummy terminals. Or ask any former Y2K IT Project Manager how much easier and less expensive their Y2K headaches would have been if they'd been utilizing ASP thin-client solutions. Let's not even touch the difficulty posed by mergers and acquisitions.