| Sumario: | Part of a special section on technological innovations. The emergence of new forms of technology has dispersed control of large networks from the center to the periphery. The introduction of the client-server style of computing in the late 1980s saw the dispersal of control to users on the network's edge, meaning that whole layers of middle managers, whose job was to shuffle questions and answers between bosses and staff, were cut out. However, the strongest centrifugal force at work today is the one that is reshaping the telephone system in the image of the Internet. Internet telephony could have been realized in the mid 1990s, but the political, social, and economic conditions were not ripe.
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