ASPs climb quietly to the summit  By Graeme Philipson August 16,
2005 An ASP by any other name: Doug Farber says the SaaS model
makes it easy for people to try before they buy. Photo: Jim  An
ASP by any other name: Doug Farber says the SaaS model makes it
easy for people to try before they buy. Photo: Jim Rice  In the
late 1990s, during the tech boom, one of the big ideas was that
of the application service provider, inevitably acronymised to
ASP. ASPs, it was promised, would be the next big thing.  They
would turn the software industry on its head. They would
revolutionise they way we do business. They would move the world
from a product-centric to a services-centric model.  The idea
was a good one, or at least seemed to be during the tech boom,
when popular wisdom had it that the internet would become the
universal medium for every business transaction and every
service. "Service", of course, being the S in ASP.  Under the
ASP model, software suppliers would not sell software as a
product, where you buy it