This article proposes that there is a recognizable and information, then the more it is the case that appropriate predictable life cycle to important general enabling techdecisions can be made on the spot by the person or pernologies such as the railroad, or the telephone, or the sons affected. Centralized decision making is appropriate ''Net.'' This life cycle, in simple terms, consists of three for an information-sparse environment, which is the reastages: A stage of experimentation and development; a son of course that the military, operating in an environstage of societal concern with issues of equity and access, with concomitant regulations; and a stage when ment with poor and contradictory information, what the emphasis shifts to efficiency and effectiveness, with Clausewitz famously characterized as the ''fog of war,'' concomitant emphasis upon competition and deregulais the classic centrally controlled hierarchy. As information. The point of this life cycle analysis is that it illumition and communications improve, then more and more nates the phenomenon that while the great previous subtle, more particular, more individualized decisions can general enabling technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries have all recently entered their third, deregulatory, be made locally. stage, creating a Stage III mind-set, the Net is only just
This theme and themes of its type are hardly novel.
entering its second, regulatory, stage. From this analy-
There is a substantial literature on long-wave business sis, from the tension thereby revealed, some issues and cycles, Freeman & Perez, 1988; Kondraparadoxes can be illuminated and understood, and oth- tieff, 1984; and discussion of whether ers revealed for further analysis. The thrust of this article derives from the thesis that the Net is entering a very they are a true phenomenon or an artifact, and to what different phase in its likely life cycle than that of the degree they are technologically driven (Dosi, 1988;