RE: JXTA, right around the turn of the century, it felt like there was an opportunity for a globe-spanning peer-to-peer application layer, based on content-addressable storage.

DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.

But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.

Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.

And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.