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2002, more than 1 million people had downloaded the FreeNet software, including dissidents in China. Clarke moved on to found a Santa Monica firm called Uprizer Inc., which hoped to use similar architecture to save companies money. The idea was that by distributing information throughout a big company's personal computers, the firm could cut down on expensive storage and server space. Intel and others invested $4 million.

Others that saw the benefits included the U.S. Army, where the technical director of the Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command realized that equipping soldiers with small machines that spoke to each other removed the danger of depending on a big server that was a central point of failure. "This is serious research," said the official, Michael Macedonia. "You don't want to put all your data on one server because once you take that server out, then you've got a lot of blind people with a lot of useless electronics."

In civilian life, the giants were moving, too, albeit slowly. Intel was among the fastest, moving its internal chip-development efforts and a training system to a peer-to-peer network that took advantage of unused computer time. In two years, the moves upped the rate of Intel's computer utilization from 50 percent to 90 percent, according to Chief Technology Officer Patrick Gelsinger, and saved Intel close to $1 billion. "Napster became a lightning rod, this uniformly sensible inflection point for the industry," Gelsinger said. "Peer-to-peer is to some degree a fad that labels a bigger and longer-term trend. Peer-to-peer, grid computing, and Web services are all part of a march toward distributed computing."

By late 2002, more than half of the employees who responded to a Comdex poll said their firms either were using peer-to-peer or planned to within a year. While the VC fever for peer-to-peer companies wore off in six months, real companies are saving real money with it. Drug firm GlaxoSmithKline uses Groove Networks Inc. to help employees collaborate on online documents. Big law firm Baker & McKenzie uses NextPage Inc. to skip most centralized repositories and speed the hunt for documents. The applications will keep changing, but their general use will increase over time until it becomes standard. "Peer-to-peer is not an invention. It's more of an approach," said Uprizer's Clarke, twenty-five. All the attention and money that followed Napster into the sector "cre-

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