h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The big difference between an Application Service Provider and these other products is that with an ASP you can "lease" applications so to speak, instead of having to front the costs of high-powered server equipment and software. That alone will help it catch on more, I'd think.

It's not aimed at the individual, but at big enterprise-wide software. And if they haven't worked through the potential unreliability, they'll die a fiery death I'm sure.

I still don't know why an article with little real info and lots of bashing is being approved.

I do.

But it'll cost you to find out.

The companies I know of who buy ASP-hosted applications basically do it for one of three reasons:

1) They need something fairly quickly, and don't have time to deal with in-house IS department bureaucracy; or

2) They need something incredibly quickly (like next week); or

3) They want to try the thing out, and if it works they'll move it in-house.

Problem 1 doesn't apply to every company, and in situations where it does there will eventually be an evolutionary pressure on the IS department to fix the situation, and ASP use will fade.

Situations 2 and 3 are valid, and will probably keep ASP profitable as a niche market -- but the idea that normal applications are going to go away and that everyone will rent their word processor as a service running on a server somewhere out there on the Internet... that's just ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if people were already denying they'd ever said it.