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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This review, and others, can be found at www.lettersonpages.com

Carr made an analogy of Internet with electricity. It opens your eyes for the Internet technology impacts on economics and mass communication.

Towards the end of the last chapter of his book, Nicholas Carr relates an anecdote about the visit of a guest speaker to the Google headquarters:

George Dyson, a historian of technology…, Freeman Dyson, was invited to Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in October 2005 to give a speech at the party celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of von Neumann’s invention [of an electronic computer that could store in its memory the instructions for its use]. “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, “Dyson would later recall of his visit, “I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air.” After his talk, Dyson found himself chatting with a Google engineer about the company’s controversial plan to scan the contents of the world’s libraries into its database. “We are not scanning all of those books to be read by people,” the engineer told him. “We are scanning them to be read by an [artificial intelligence engine].”

So concludes this work — a view of technical progress from the emergence of electricity to the emergence of what Carr calls “the World Wide Computer.” In successive chapters, he builds the story line from the harnessing of electricity for commercial use to the economics of the migration from private power generation to common utility. He then uses that story line to illustrate the change happening with isolated computers being supplanted by a common computing utility. Call it a “grid” or “computing in the cloud,” Carr’s vision of the future is dominated by a computing infrastructure that is greater than the sum of its parts: an infrastructure that we are all a part of building right now and an infrastructure that is as inevitable as the emergence of the electric utility that our lives depend on. An infrastructure built on the knowledge embedded in the choices each of us make online and the machine’s comprehension of the knowledge gleaned from the scans of the books of the world’s libraries.

Carr’s work is easy to read — clearly the work of a writer who excels at expressing himself clearly. The ease at which one can read the words, though, only underscores the utterly transformative nature of the world now emerging. The picture he paints is not only of a rosy, utopian future, however. Carr gives equal time to the problems and challenges of the “big switch” to the World Wide Computer. But he makes clear that the World Wide Computer is in our future, just as sure as we are of what happens each time we flip a light switch. ( )

In an instructive and oft-entertaining manner, Carr illuminates parallels between the historical development of electricity (shift from local production to power plants capable of realizing economies of scale) and the current evolution of the Internet and software as a service. ( )

The book is an accelerating read on recent changes in information technology and their impact on the society of the 21th century.

Carr compares the recent developments toward grid, and cloud computing to the mayor transition in the USA from individually owned power stations to a centralised power grid. Through this comparison he shows the present changes in the context of another era of technological change. This moderates the feeling of The-Exceptionalism-Of-Our-Times so often found in the accounts of other commentators on the technological changes of today.

As Carr discusses the developments toward grid computing, he describes the economical realities for businesses and consumers alike. In his account he portrays the recent developments in all their ambiguity: higher efficiency through automation vs unprecedented job losses for white collar workers; growing freedom of expression through easily distributed user generated content vs increasingly hard working conditions for professionals in the information business; equal power to digitally create for everyone vs rising inequality through huge economical rewards for few individuals; growing personalisation vs growing control for large institutions through huge amounts of rich data.

Carr shows the flip-sides to nearly universally praised innovations. Without negating their possibilities he also shows their often unintended consequences. With his book Carr brings the discussions of professionals and academics on those topics to the main stream.

In the epilogue Nicholas Carr reminds us that progress seems only linear through the benefit of hindsight. This book is a timely reminder that technological innovations do not always result in the promised or envisioned benefits. No matter what changes we foresee for society, no matter how carefully we plan, the unintended and unforeseen consequences of our actions are just as likely to change societies in ways not imagined by us.

“The Big Switch” is a great primer on advancements in different branches of information technology. It is also a great treatise on the nature of technological change and its resulting changes in societies. ( )

The Big Switch talks about the business impact of the internet and computing as a service, drawing a comparison to the evolution of electricity from custom implementations to a big utility. The historical discussion is interesting, though I'm not convinced that the analogy will hold with the informational aspects of computing. In the latter part of the book, Carr talks about some of the social impacts that we're seeing, which speaks as a warning to me. The internet is polarizing beliefs and eroding personal privacy, and I don't think we've figured out the full consequence of this. The one criticism I'll make of the book is that while Carr does a good job discussing the issues, I don't feel that he really presents any novel predictions or solutions. ( )

I just started to read this book. Very well written insightful and well worth the time and money.

Excellent set of examples to support the movement of IT infrastructure to 3rd parties from internally ran solutions today. ( )

This book reads differently in its two halves. The first half is a rather ordinary retelling of two tales in parallel. The first is a history of electricity, and the second is a history of computing. Though done competently, the far more interesting and provocative perspective comes in the second half. There, Carr draws many examples of the Faustian bargain we have made in the web world. We welcome the convenience of the web, but we are gladly giving up our privacy to get it. ( )

Thought-provoking. Motivated me to look into the Amazon storage and compute clouds. ( )

http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_averag... ( )

While interesting and entertaining, The Big Switch suffers from some overgeneralizations about technology services in order to view them as a utility. Nonetheless, the book poses some interesting ramifications for the technology services and software industries by shaking the traditional software paradigm a bit and seeing what falls out.

Carr's writing is clean, clear and enjoyable, which garners it, from my perspective, at least 3 stars for being a well-written business book that is worthy of finishing. ( )

History has been known to repeat itself. In The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny, Nicholas Carr identifies one trend that seems to be doing a rerun in our modern world. He connects the rise of electrical utilities in the late nineteenth century and the advent of Internet utilities during our own era.

The parallels he presents are fascinating. Like localized power generation in the industrial age, modern IT services operate within company structures. Electrical utilities made long-distance power delivery possible, freeing companies to become subscribers rather than producers. Likewise, Carr sees the rise of Internet utilities — web 2.0 commercial storage and processing services — as factors freeing businesses of endless upgrade hassles endemic to hardware and software and motivating them toward using thin clients and farming out many IT functions.

If that was the subject of the entire book, I would have been content. But Carr abruptly changes direction halfway through. From chapter seven on, he paints a (mostly) unflattering picture of a possible future wrought by the web 2.0 dynamic. It is a world where user-generated online content is readily available but profitable for very few people. Computer programs replace thousands of people in the information business. Carr looks specifically at newspaper workers, but his readers can easily extrapolate the discussion to include librarians and other professionals. He also argues that quality in a user-generated culture will suffer and preference-driven technology will further balkanize society.

These are all worthy discussions. I’ve been involved in similiar conversations myself and find them interesting to debate. But the future of Internet culture seems more appropriate for another book. It’s related to the subject from the first half of The Big Switch, but it seems an unlikely balance for a book starting out as an historical comparison. By melding the two topics together in a single volume, Carr shortchanges both. The halves are better than the whole.

[More of my reviews are available at http://mostlynf.wordpress.com]

An excellent read. Carr has succeeded in writing intelligently about computers and computing without resorting to jargon or arcane technical descriptions. The first half of the book lays out Carr's central argument that computing is shifting to more of a centrally supplied, utility model, following the pattern of mechanical power's evolution a hundred years ago - with the Internet's "computing grid" serving as an analog to the electric grid. Our PCs are turning into network terminals, used mainly to draw data and software from the Internet. The second half of the book looks at what may happen as the computing grid - or the "World Wide Computer" - makes computing functions ever cheaper and more easily available. There are some persuasive and unsettling chapters about the effects of the next generation of computing on wealth distribution, privacy, and even the functioning of the mind. The book covers a lot of ground quickly but is rich with stories and revealing anecdotes. ( )

In the Big Switch, Nicholas Carr walks readers through the history of electrification and computing. The early years of electrification were technologically limited - an electrical grid wasn't feasible and electricity was generated locally. Technology changed over time and electricity was rapidly centralized and networked. Power was produced remotely and delivered via a vast network of wires and cables. Over time, technology changed the way we live and do business.

Based on this historical context, he draws a metaphor between electrification and the current model of computing. We're coming from a client-server model to a new model, what Carr calls "Utility Computing". He argues, like electrification, this is mostly facilitated by advances in network technology. In a utility computing environment, some firms act as utilities and merely provide a platform, while others develop applications to run on this platform. He cites Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage) services as examples; Amazon provides a centralized utility that users can quickly and at marginal cost, tap in to and rapidly develop scalable applications.

To people in the computing industry, Carr isn't saying anything new. Many of us are in the middle of transitioning our own applications from an older client-server model to a web-based or utility based model. However, I think Carr does a great job at building the metaphor between electrification and computing. While, they are very different types of services, the historical context he clearly lays out shows how network effects can disrupt existing models of utility.

However, I think Carr should have spent more time discussing some of the social implications of this technological shift. Just like how electrification changed the way we socially interact, utility computing has the power to do the same. Utility computing affords more decentralization and standardization of application development. What kind of impact is this going to have on highly complex businesses and what are the implications for users and managers? Some would argue that the technological development of Groupware in the 1980s had major social impacts on social relations in a business context. Likewise, I think utility computing will have similar effects. I wish Carr would have approached some of these more complex social questions in further detail.

Otherwise, from someone working in the industry - I think Carr is right on the button and this book is definitely a "must read" for someone in the information industry. ( )

Don't walk, run to your nearest bookstore to read Carr's dazzling THE BIG SWITCH. If you can only read one book in 2008 this should be it. The writing is clean, pure as spring water and thoughtful. Carr makes the coming "information utility" simple for the layman to understand. The description of the development of electricity and its impact on society is fascinating and lays the groundwork for the likely outcome of the information age over the next few decades. I enjoyed this book. ( )

First of all, let me preface this review with the warning that I may work too close to the subjects of this book to be very objective in my review of it. I wanted to like this book, but I don't. My reading of it was full of moments where I was filled with "Yes, but really..." or "Not really, it's more like..." moments. Worse, there were a few "I don't think that necessarily follows" issues I had with the logic of the book. There are at least a couple of chapters that if I had the inclination I could write some decent rebuttals to.

The early section of the book is about building a giant analogy between the era we live in now and the last turn of the century when mass electrification basically changed everything. It might be a good analogy and these early parts of the book are interesting for their simple documentary-like focus on "the world that was" in the analogy. Unfortunately the analogy mostly gives out and takes a back seat in the latter section, which ends up being the majority of the book, which is mainly a pedestrian enumeration of the potential downfalls and dangerous repercussions of "the world that is" that might be amplified in moving into "the world that will be". It was fairly jarring how the book moved from the tone of an interesting history documentary/exploration to a collection of bad 60 Minutes segments that lack in any real substance and barely notice the surface texture of the things being discussed. What's worse is that the book never really follows through with the initial premise offered in the early chapters. That failure to maintain the narrative over the course of the book, to keep the analogy core and center to the work, just about seems unforgivable and really keeps this book, in my mind, from being very useful at anything it sets out to be. It's certainly not very useful to describing the analogy, in that the analogy is mere premise rather than binding narrative.

If anything the book is probably most useful as a curio. It exists in that small plane between history and observation that can make bad 50s science fiction so ironically hip in its old age. This book might best be savored in 20-30 years when we might scoff at it or laugh at it. Beyond my recommendation to read this book sometime in the future, I can't find too many other people that I, as a somewhat knowledgeable person in the areas of this book, might recommend this book to... certainly not to anyone of my own generation. There might be a potential in it to explain some things to my parents' or my grandparents' generations, but I'm afraid the book would give them too many misconceptions and thus I might only really recommend a chapter or two rather than the entire book.

Cross-posted to my blog: http://blog.worldmaker.net/2007/... ( )