> Same thing is happening now, but people have been focusing the
> attention on the music companies, and missing another, perhaps more
> to-the-point route-around, radio is being redefined.

There's another, more direct parallel with mainframes: the server is
being routed around as well.

The internet's current client-server architecture for end users was
retrofitted onto the old peer-to-peer architecture because of 4
bottlenecks:

Bad hardware
Unstable OSes
Slow and intermittant connectivity
32 bit address space

Moore's law (broadly conceived), the rise of Linux and NT4, and the
arrival of broadband fixed problems 1-3, but it took Napster to link
those with both file transfers and the breaking of the dynamic IP
bottleneck in a way that made intuitive sense.

With the orgy of peer-to-peer projects being conceived (I spent the
weekend at a Softbank retreat and it was all anybody could talk
about), if there is any extensibility to p2p generally, we should see
new uses within 6 months or so.

-c

--
Clay Shirky | shirky.com - Essays on the Internet:
http://www.shirky.com/ | Culture, Economics, Globalization