Well here I go putting one more piece of data about myself out there in the cloud, so perhaps I wasn’t as scared as I thought I was after reading “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr. Yesterday, when I read about AOL # 4417749 aka Thelma Arnold, I thought seriously about deleting every account I had and laying low for at least two years, so that Google (My favorite Big Brother.) would forget about me. Maybe I’m braver than I thought and I should go ahead and try reading Stephen King, or maybe I’m just still confident that I can say “No” the hidden subliminal sales pitches, or maybe I’m just being foolish, but I can’t see myself ever allowing them to implant a computer in my head. I can even stand the thought of getting my ears pierced, but I am a little worried about my grandsons who love computer games. ( )

Although some specifics in this book on cloud computing already feel dated, the more general points are quite interesting and well argued. The latter half of the book, where Carr discusses potential societal impacts of what he calls the World Wide Computer, are particularly good. ( )

Think with Carr about the continued explosion of the Internet into the world of utility computing that changes the way we think about computing in schools, not just businesses.

How can I not like a book when the author draws from multiple sources from my library, including an author who wrote on the history of the electrical grid, a favorite culture critic named Neil Postman, and especially relevant to what we do, Beniger’s book, The Control Revolution (a history of the origination of Information Governance that ought to be mandatory reading for everyone on the governance project).

The first half of the book is a very cogent and compelling description of utility computing. I finally get it—I really didn’t get it until I read his book. Reasonable explanation, well thought out explanation of trends, makes lots of sense, and nothing that strikes me as being wildly inflated or unreasonable.

After spending the first half talking about all the potential up side, he starts delving into the dark side, first of utility computing. Unlike Utopians such Tapscott and Friedman, he correctly points out that continuing improvements in IT economies of scale mean a lot of displacement in the job market, and he discusses the implications in detail. Then he pretty much walks away from utility computing (which is what the ‘big switch’ refers to) and starts addressing other sorts of unfortunate consequences of the evolving Internet. Unlike Anderson (Long Tail), Carr feels that the leverage made possible by the Internet will put all sorts of ‘crafts people’ out of business. He cites the example of a hugely popular dating site, with millions of customers in multiple countries—completely run by a single individual.

He discusses how opinion polarization will be exacerbated by Internet technology that enables people to not just pick and choose sources that exactly mirror their own opinions (refer to what I said in the top paragraph), but filtering and preference technology will actually encourage it. Think about how media choice has already exacerbated political polarization—Carr has significant concerns that the Internet may be bad for democracy.

Then he starts in on privacy, and search. He’s got a couple of useful insights on Google, and then he zeroes in on what he feels is the end goal of Brin and Page—total integration of the human brain with the Internet, augmented by Google’s search burgeoning capabilities. This is NOT a story that Battelle told in The Big Search, but Carr has several very interesting quotes from not only the founders, but also Schmidt. He makes a compelling case that this is an ongoing agenda for them. Essentially, he suggests that Google is well on its way towards becoming The Beast." ( )

My latest review is The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr. Carr is an excellent author who writes about various technical/computing topics for the New York Times, Wired, and other publications. Carr is also the author of Does IT Matter?, which was generally misinterpreted by the IT community as an attack on IT. (His real point was that IT is no longer a competitive advantage for almost all companies because everyone does it, and all new innovations are quickly adopted by others).

In The Big Switch, Carr makes the argument that the future of computing and the internet (hereby to be referred to as the “intergoogle”) is coming fast…and is dramatically affecting the way we do business, socialize, and generally “compute.” The main thesis of the book is that computing power/storage is turning into a utility, rather than powered privately.

The method Carr uses to is to show the parallels between computing and electricity. It is very interesting to see how alike those two systems are…and Carr does a fantastic job making the comparison. In the first section of the book he alternates chapters between Edison’s world and the modern world…tying them together the entire way. It is very interesting to read about how (controlled) electricity found its way and expanded from its humble beginnings. But then again, I like history…and especially history about stuff that has been invented. (Side note: I would recommend Edison: A Life of Invention to anyone interested in that topic).

In the early stages, almost all electricity was generated privately for various corporations. Edison then wanted to provide electricity to New York City, which he was able to do after installing all of the infrastructure and building HUGE generator farms. Edison felt that the profit for electricity was in the electric dynamo, which generated all of the power. But one man, Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s employees saw it differently. Insull believed that the real money to be made was in providing electricity as a utility…rather than selling everyone the equipment individually. Insull left Edison to run the Chicago Edison Company, which he ran like a utility and proved his theory to be correct. So when you are mad at Duke Energy for raising rates and charging you too much…you have Samuel Insull to blame.

Carr's choice of analogy proves to be right on...although its not something I would normally think of. But Carr makes such a strong case that we are headed in that direction. He lucidly explains how companies like Google and Salesforce.com are able to provide Web 2.0 services for their customers...and their customers love it.

Everyone pretty much already knows about Google and what it does with its search, e-mail, calendar, etc... Salesforce.com, on the other hand, is an interesting company that people don't generally know about. Salesforce.com provides customer/client information for a company's sales force. Like Google, all of the data as accessed remotely through their servers. This allows the company to be able to focus its attention on what it does best. They just leave all of the computing up to Salesforce.com. Obviously, there would be some security and data concerns, but apparently Salesforce.com has answered enough questions to be quite successful.

This book is a really interesting look at what the future of computing holds for corporate life and personal life as well. As more and more people use Web 2.0 applications for their own data storage, it will snowball this process (as an example...I am writing this right now using Google Docs). I don't foresee any time soon when all data storage is done remotely, because a lot of people will always want to be able to have it "physically" with them...but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Utility computing is coming...and Nicholas Carr lays out exactly how it will happen. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in technology. There were a few slow parts...but overall it was a fantastic read.

Rating: 5 out of 5
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