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But let's say for the minute that it's a service provider or information exchange (and a pretty massive one at that. I heard the other day that 75% of American college kids use Napster). Napster is one of the few Internet products around whereby users allow other users to poke around their computers. The primary user inputs tracks from compact discs or downloads into their computers, and the songs are stored as MP3 files. The Napster software allows that user to then connect, via Napster's servers, to the MP3 files of other users. At any one time, there might be more than a million files available for plunder -- and bear in mind Napster uses a number of servers. That's several million songs that Sony or Universal don't sell. Are you shorting their shares yet?

You can even search for a specific artist, or track, but I must say, there is something weird about seeing someone creep around in your hard drive, downloading songs from you. I find it akin to watching someone steal from your house, and you letting them. Of course it's all free. Napster doesn't openly encourage you to download content. In fact, the site is remarkably no-frills, and I suspect purposefully so. But with speaker technology as good as it gets, people nowadays are rigging up computers where home stereo systems once were and downloading tracks for parties where you never run out of dance music.

But take the Napster idea beyond music and apply it to, say, the written word. Let's say some software was available that enabled a search of someone's pdf files, or word processing documents. Let's say I wanted a broker's report into Pacific Century CyberWorks, or the last confidential CIA file on Iraq, some respected academic's take on the genome project, or a planned takeover offer document.

Just like music files, I log on using Napster-like software and search for what I want. It's a bit like a super Google search, except you don't use the Internet but go direct to the user computer, which may have been accidentally left on, connected to the network with U.S. President Bill Clinton's to-do list on it.

At the moment, we can find most things via Net searches but that is generally only if the user has applied the information to the Net via an upload. Imagine if the information doesn't require uploading, that it's just sitting there on a hard drive ready for viewing.

Napster and its derivatives are utterly transforming, to the extent of even replacing the Internet and web pages themselves. And it's all for free. How is Napster going to make money? It says from T-shirts. Would you buy a company that sells T-shirts?

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