They rewarded the sharing of information, essentially bringing together the buyers and sellers of information within the company. The field of application development has serious problems. There is the thick versus thin client debate. There are problems with updates to software distribution in the client-server environment, but it does provide the user with significant online guidance, which the web largely does not yet have. The browser is the universal interface and reaches further than any other interface, but it has given up a lot of functionality.
Browsers have no flow control, resiliency or native recovery.
Because the web is stateless you can't go back to a previous point in a transaction, instead you have to start over. Automatic software installation wizards are basically CICS encapsulated in a browser. It lets you go back and undo what you've done. They are very expensive to build in a web environment that does not natively handle transactions. CICS professionals are the ones who really understand transactions and they are the ones who will carry the water as business goes onto the web.