I just found an interesting blog post titled Web 2.0 & Death of the Network Engineer. The argument is that Network Engineers are no longer relevant to today’s Internet because the complexity of underlying network infrastructure and basic network services has been abstracted away.

There’s something to this argument when you analyze ordinary web startups that are doing the same thing everybody else is doing. If you’re not doing anything unique, you probably won’t need to go any lower than the HTTP protocol to build your application. But the most interesting startups today (and always) are the ones that are pushing the envelope. Companies like Joost (TV over the Internet), dash (sat-nav with realtime traffic information), Jangl (phone call anonymizer), and sling all require low level network engineering to do right. There are even companies like Aspera that have built their entire business around innovative network technologies (they provide file transfer technologies for many popular software packages, e.g. iTunes).

One could argue that all of these companies are doing things outside of the typical HTTP client/server environment of the web, which is why they require special network technologies. But isn’t breaking out of the normal client/server web environment the whole point of “Web 2.0?”