Fair enough. I see your Minitel and raise you a Compuserve. But I'm not referring to early adopters. Or transnational, gov't sponsored enterprise (GSE) including academics.

I'm looking back at big moves in the quarter century, not theory, but arc of an S-curve for each line of business, so to speak. The '90s were an especially heady period for transnational M&A --especially telecom P&E. Remember AT&T/BT/Vodaphone! UCC/MCI/Woldcom! Qualcom! L3! You see a pattern yet?

• EU: Break-up of national telecoms not to mention DTV transition mandates, state-by-state. This policy had tremendous competitive effect across telecom sectors which US continues to trail. Thing is, european demand.
  
• USA: "Consumer" --explosive VC investment in IP and hardware toward e-commerce, B2B and B2C. I entered the markets with AOL and Compuserve in '91, on a Mac, before Yahoo! and GOOG. Now look. Which european will tell you Facebook is indispensible?
  
• ROW: Cellular service. Not a theory, I used to subscribe to proprietary market-makers eg. Gartner, Forrester, HfS & IDC. Phones were cheap, are cheaper than PC. Now look. Only Facebook balloons have been trying to PENETRATE this network.
  

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.