I have never been keen on the mainframe plan of operation. You have greater control if you are the parent company, but as a worker bee, the take it with you even when you go up the Snake River for trout fishing application is the ideal way. The ubiquitous nature of the Internet is NOT ubiquitous and likely will never be as there are too many places on the world (and, one day, beyond) where the population will never sustain the cost of a link to the net. Of course, if the folks who lead us to the teleporter and FTL invent some method to reliably communicate over distances measured in parsecs, maybe... but, even then you still have to deal with excessive lag time.