Instead, it retreated to a horizontal strategy, and it is now licensing its technology to all phone vendors. This is the great thing about infrastructure. From fibre-optic components to Web switches, infrastructure lends itself naturally to intellectual property. Owning even the tiniest horizontal sliver of protected technology means wide licensing and a very profitable venture. This in turn pays for new research and development to fund even more innovative slivers.
Infrastructure also benefits from crazes in other Internet fields.
More bandwidth is needed to handle the traffic. WorldCom puts in more fibre, Sycamore sells more optical access equipment, Exodus hosts more Sun servers and Intel Pentium boxes running Linux. Oracle sells more databases, Vitria sells more business-process software, Inktomi sells more caches, Foundry sells more switches, Cisco sells more routers. The infrastructure market booms. Like it or not, technology is now the backbone of the U.S. economy.