They now must live outside the firewall. This becomes especially relevant in areas of content management, where a whole new genre of middlemen is emerging to enable the seamless transfer and reformatting of content. Kinecta is an infrastructure provider in the syndication space. It was a heterogeneous mess. Then the Net came along, powered by standards like HTML, and just routed around all those proprietary systems.
Centralization is anti-Web.
It doesn't bend and flex with the Internet. So, today the challenge has become creating a standard-based infrastructure where everybody can integrate their services, so they don't have to worry about how their partners' systems are configured. So in today's Internet economy, collaboration has become a dominant dimension of competitive strategy. There are other manifestations of the collaborative phenomenon. The ascent of the ASP model and the trend toward outsourcing are good examples.