Since 1994, when the company began developing its direct-broadcast satellite operations, Hughes has been quietly transforming itself into a consumer concern that beams more than 200 television channels to about 10 million homes and businesses worldwide.

The Internet is quietly transforming Japan, making celebrities of small farmers like the Kimuras, empowering women, changing the way people apply for jobs and schools and generally chipping away at traditional patterns of behavior.

But even as I.B.M. was looking for new partners, the company quietly transformed its own software effort.

In small claims courts across the country, mediators and arbitrators are quietly transforming the way justice is dispensed.

He quietly transforms.

In New York City, it quietly transformed the winter of 1995-96 into the snowiest in the 127 years that accurate weather records have been kept.

Yet here in Chicago, the Tribune Company has been quietly transforming itself in recent years into what its executives say is a new media company that funnels old media content to television, cable, radio and the Internet.

Tommy Flanagan is the epitome of the be-bop pianist, spinning out easy, elegant yet thoroughly unpredictable melodies as he quietly transforms a song's harmonies.

Week by week for more than a year, he has been quietly transforming the political and policy apparatus of the White House into the most powerful campaign-in-waiting that has ever existed.