 Furthermore, the various hardware and software components of the Internet are designed, manufactured and supported by thousands of different companies.Thus, completing any given task on the Internet, such as retrieving a webpage, relies on the contributions of hundreds of people at a hundred or more distinct companies, each of which may have only very tenuous connections with each other.In contrast, videotex was always highly centralized (except in the French Minitel service, also including thousands of information providers running their own servers connected to the packet switched network "TRANSPAC").