I enjoyed the flow of your thoughts Peter. I hope you will appreciate this parallel that I'm going to mention. Back in the 1980's, "help desks" began to try to keep up with what then was an explosion of complexity in technical support due to networking and the young raw internet-ish world of FTP and new telecomm. KnowledgeBases quickly sprouted along with a variety of techniques for sorting through help requests and problem statements, such as Case Based Reasoning, inference systems, and others .... Add emerging search technologies, and the history of designing and managing support featured massive transformations of organizations and practices redefining service request response and problem resolution. I'm not even up to Y2K yet with this story, but my point is that what you're describing is the same phenomenon now in a different ecosystem. You're right to focus the observation on a business transformation, since the real question is, why did clients and providers choose to avoid focusing on the leading indicators of knowledge-centered support and knowledge management already in place more than 15 years ago? The answer was not technology maturity. The answer is business culture, I propose.