Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

Progress in the IT universe traditionally required new layers of complexity for every corresponding iota of capability (at least until some intrepid soul braved a new approach to remove the hassle). The movement from mainframe to client-server unleashed an innovation explosion, but also created fragmentation at the computing infrastructure level, resulting in a splintering of IT technical and organizational silos for decades.