Today, of course, music-subscription businesses and streaming services such as Pandora dominate digital music. Had the record companies partnered with Napster, MP3.com, or any of the other file sharing networks instead of suing them, they might control digital music sales today--without nearly as many problems with piracy.

Look at today's interactive, social-media-obsessed, user-content-driven Web, and what do you see? A spiffier version of CompuServe circa 1994. But instead of dominating the online world, CompuServe got its butt kicked by AOL and that company's 50 billion "free" CDs.

In the early 1990s the Compuserve Information Service had "an unbelievable set of advantages that most companies would kill for: a committed customer base, incredible data about those customers' usage patterns, a difficult-to-replicate storehouse of knowledge, and little competition," says Kip Gregory, a management consultant and author of . "What it lacked was probably ... the will to invest in converting those advantages into a sustainable lead."

Then AOL came along, offering flat-rate "unlimited" pricing (versus CompuServe's hourly charges), a simpler interface, and a massive, carpet-bombing CD marketing campaign. Organizations that had an early presence on CompuServe forums moved over to the Web, which CompuServe's forums were slow to support. In 1997 , and last June.