Like the superhuman characters who fill the pages of your favorite comic books, the 25 most powerful people in networking have their own special powers. Who's to say that Vinod Khosla, a general partner with Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, doesn't have a sort of X-ray vision - a psychic view into the future.

He has certainly demonstrated clairvoyance in his choice of companies and technologies to back. Khosla's been incredibly influential in optical networking and is now doing the same in the application service provider market.

Undoubtedly people like Carl Yankowski, CEO of Palm, or Ellen Hancock, CEO of Exodus Communications, must feel like they're holding the world in their hands. Their respective products and services are in high demand, and they're changing the way the world conducts business.

Then we've got executives like AT&T Chairman C. Michael Armstrong and WorldCom President Bernie Ebbers. Certainly they're hoping that, like Spider Man, they'll be endowed with special sticking power. Their mighty empires are deeply troubled these days, and if their corporate rebuilding strategies crumble, they just might find themselves falling into oblivion and off our Power 25 list for 2001.

Of course, Armstrong and Ebbers wouldn't be the first perennial favorites to vanish into thin air. Gone from our Power 25 list this year, for example, is Rich McGinn, ousted Lucent CEO (for obvious reasons), and William Kennard, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. With this year's election revealing no mandate, it's hard to tell who in Washington will remain magnates and who will become has-beens. And gone, but not forgotten, is Eric Schmidt, Novell's CEO. His power is so seriously on the wane, we've bumped him down to our "50 others" category.