Centralized Wins. Decentralized Loses
The article is extremely light on substance.  This issue can be more readily addressed with a simple list:<p>Centralization pros:<p><pre><code>  * security
  * ease of management
  * lower overhead in task delegation
  * maintenance simplicity
  * versioning
  * no distribution
</code></pre>
Centralization cons:<p><pre><code>  * fixed resources
  * fixed configuration
  * fixed environment
</code></pre>
Looking at these lists centralization at first appears immediately superior.  These lists is an illusion in that it accounts for concerns in the present, but it does not account for growth or future concerns.  Decentralized systems can scale in ways centralized systems cannot.<p>The fixed nature of a centralized system is also a huge limitation.  Projects like SETI@Home and Folding@Home illustrate that thousands of lower powered distributed nodes are better for computation than a single centrally managed super computer.  While the computation power of super computers grows rapidly over time so too does the computation power of your average home computer.<p>There is also an economic qualifier for distribution too.  Computational resources cost money in both hardware and electricity.  When computational tasks are distributed so too are the expenses of computation.<p>There is also a security/availability benefit to distributed systems.  Centralized systems are a single point of failure.  Distributed systems, at least in the public space, are diverse in their hardware and software which allows the system immunization from many forms of attacks.  A centralized system can be isolated from the world by a DDOS attack, but it is substantially hard to attack a distributed system in this way.