Geek Reads 2008.3: The Big Switch

I was fortunate a few weeks ago to attend a breakfast meeting where the featured speaker was Nicholas Carr, he of the recent Atlantic Monthly article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and the famous and controversial essay (and, later, book) "IT Doesn't Matter."

The topic of Mr. Carr's presentation was his new book:  "The Big Switch," which I received at the event, took home and devoured.  The quality of the writing affirmed Mr. Carr's place at the top left of my PageFlakes "A-list Blogs" page, the digital equivalent of "Page 1, above the fold" in the world of newspapers (remember newspapers? see pp 151-157 in the book).

Carr builds on many of themes first surfaced in "IT Doesn't Matter," such as the metaphor of electricity to describe the evolution of information technology from an in-house component of the business to an outsourced utility that organizations can obtain more efficiently from a utility-style "grid."  Carr's historical research recalls many of Doug Burgum's keynote speeches at Microsoft events -- he grabs an historical figure of great relevance to the story but little notoriety, then he weaves a great story around an inflection point that this person created. Everyone has heard of Thomas Edison, but who knew about Samuel Insull?

Similarly to Sun's Eric Schmidt ("The Network is the Computer") expression in the 1990s, Carr puts forth the idea of the "World Wide Computer" to describe how computing power, human intelligence, and programmability of applications on the Internet can be put to use under the utility model he envisions. 

Carr goes on to review some of the consequences of this phenomenon, including:

• Companies executing against this model today (e.g., Salesforce.com, WorkDay.com, Amazon Web Services, Flickr, 3Tera, etc.)
• Broad societal and economic effects of the rise of the  "World Wide Computer" (e.g., concentration of wealth and control, fragmentation, polarization, crowdsourcing)
• Security and risk related to the "World Wide Computer," (e.g., the death of privacy as we know it)
• changes in how we as humans think and process information -- a precursor to an idea explored in greater depth in the Atlantic article

The last paragraph of the book was possibly my favorite.  In it, Carr describes technological change as generational change.  Remember this, you who have young workers entering the workforce:

"The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins."

In speaking with knowledge workers and executives, I often remind them that they will soon have a workforce who has never known a world without tools like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.  "The Big Switch" details quite ably, in the language of economics, history, business and technology, what we should be prepared to do about it.

Comments

[Carol]

How fun to happen upon this entry. Doug has been a very good friend for a lot of years, it always surprises me when someone sites his speeches. We just figure it's Doug rambling. He just can't help himself.

Typical example (Only Doug would nominate the sitting Govenor by recalling a convention he attended with Kay many many years ago.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmYn1IT3Us

[Mike Gil]

Thanks for the note, Carol. I was interested to learn, upon sitting on the Partner Advisory Council for the Convergence event/show a few years ago, that Doug's keynotes were consistently BOTH the highest and the lowest rated of all (either you love his style, or you don't, apparently). If he doesn't end up representing North Dakota in government somewhere, I hope he starts to write books, in which case the likes of Michael Pollan will have lots to worry about. Convergence certainly isn't the same without his keynotes...