Back in the mid-1990s when the Web was young, corporate Intranets were popping up at companies all over the place. They were usually quick and dirty efforts that often involved off-the-shelf parts and little (if any) programming. The idea was to produce a corporate Web portal that was just for internal use, enabling staff to share documents, best practices, customer information and the like. But corporate instranets are mostly historical artifacts now. What happened? No one saw it coming at the time, but in retrospect the failure of the corporate Intranet offers a classic lesson in how even popular categories of products can be quickly made obsolete by seemingly unrelated technological advances and social changes. TCP/IP Happened So, what killed the Intranet? TCP/IP was the first culprit. Back in the mid-90s, corporate networks used a hodge-podge of protocols, including SNA and Netware. No one talks about those anymore. Having an all-IP network made it easier to adopt more...