Hmm, Dennis, interesting message. No disagreement with anything you said. Not clear what to do next, though. I think you are saying that the Internet has been very successful, fairly constantly outrunning its own technology capabilities. As this success happened, people started to rely on it and assumed growth and wealth for generations to come, perhaps neglecting significant and necessary and fairly short term (1-3 (5?) years deployment horizon) development efforts at the right time, and rather shifting development to other areas that may pan out further in the future (e.g., your ATM comment). Grumble. I would agree that most activities I noticed where fairly tactical or longer term research, not much time-middleware. What do you suggest we should do now? Hans-Werner PS: My "profit hungry and not much investing" comment was in response to getting a tad annoyed at 10% packet losses being just fine. You know that I know that there are people out there who take things more seriously than that.