By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 08/15/05

Listen hard and you might hear the paradigms shifting.

In 1997, then-Bell Labs researcher David Isenberg wrote a groundbreaking story criticizing AT&T's top-down approach to networks, which emphasized the importance of intelligence within the network. In his piece, Isenberg made a cogent argument favoring network "stupidity" - networks that focused simply on transporting bits, leaving the intelligence to end-user devices.

The story - which led to Isenberg's much-publicized departure from his then employer - neatly expressed the paradigm shift that had been under way for the previous couple of decades, and which was a classic case of the emergence of a disruptive technology: the IP revolution. (If you're not familiar with the concept of a disruptive technology, check out Clayton Christensen's outstanding book The Innovator's Dilemma).