The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google [Hardcover]

Nicholas Carr (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0393062287 | ISBN-13: 978-0393062281 | Publication Date: January 17, 2008 | Edition: Edition Unstated

An eye-opening look at the new computer revolution and the coming transformation of our economy, society, and culture.

A hundred years ago, companies stopped producing their own power with steam engines and generators and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities not only changed how businesses operated but also brought the modern world into existence. Today a similar revolution is under way. Companies are dismantling their private computer systems and tapping into rich services delivered over the Internet. This time it’s computing that’s turning into a utility. The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google to the fore and threatening traditional stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. In this lucid and compelling book, Nicholas Carr weaves together history, economics, and technology to explain why computing is changing—and what it means for all of us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While it may seem that we're in the midst of an unprecedented technological transition, Carr (Does IT Matter?) posits that the direction of the digital revolution has a strong historical corollary: electrification. Carr argues that computing, no longer personal, is going the way of a power utility. Manufacturers used to provide their own power (i.e., windmills and waterwheels) until they plugged into the electric grid a hundred years ago. According to Carr, we're in the midst of a similar transition in computing, moving from our own private hard drives to the computer as access portal. Soon all companies and individuals will outsource their computing systems, from programming to data storage, to companies with big hard drives in out-of-the-way places. Carr's analysis of the recent past is clear and insightful as he examines common computing tools that are embedded in the Internet instead of stored on a hard drive, including Google and YouTube. The social and economic consequences of this transition into the utility age fall somewhere between uncertain and grim, Carr argues. Wealth will be further consolidated into the hands of a few, and specific industries, publishing in particular, will perish at the hands of crowdsourcing and the unbundling of content. However, Carr eschews an entirely dystopian vision for the future, hypothesizing without prognosticating. Perhaps lucky for us, he leaves a great number of questions unanswered. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Carr's provocations are destined to influence CEOs and the boards and investors that support them. -- Wall Street Journal

Compulsively readable—for nontechies, too—as it compellingly weaves together news stories, anecdotes, and data. -- Fast Company

Persuasive, well-researched, authoritative and convincing....He's reasonable in his conclusions and moderate in his extrapolations. This is an exceedingly good book. -- Techworld

Quick, clear read on an important theme. -- BusinessWeek

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Edition Unstated edition (January 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393062287
• ISBN-13: 978-0393062281
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #96,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #26 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Information Theory
  • #94 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Culture

More About the Author

Nicholas Carr's latest book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," is a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. A New York Times bestseller, "The Shallows" discusses the personal and cultural consequences of Internet and computer use and, more broadly, examines the role that media and other technologies have played in shaping intellectual history. Carr is also the author of the 2008 bestseller "The Big Switch," which ranked #4 on Newsweek's 2009 list of 50 Books to Read Now, and of the influential 2004 book "Does IT Matter?" He wrote the celebrated and much-anthologized essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he has also contributed to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, Wired, The Guardian, the Financial Times, The Futurist, Strategy & Business, and other periodicals. He was formerly the executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. Carr blogs at www.roughtype.com. More information about his work can be found at his website, www.nicholascarr.com. [Author photo by Joanie Simon.]

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

226 of 249 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Big Switch in Many Ways, December 29, 2007

By 

Mark P. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (Hardcover)

Nicholas Carr's latest book The Big Switch is not the book that many would expect, in fact its better. Carr, who made his fame by making the assertion that IT doesn't Matter and then asking the question Does IT matter? deals with this subject for about 10% of the book. The remainder concentrates on Carr's looking forward to business, society, politics and the world we are creating. It's a welcome switch as it enables Carr to discuss broader issues rather than hammering on a narrow point.

The net score of three stars is based on the following logic. This book gets four stars as it's is a good anthological review of broader issues that have been in the marketplace for some time. It loses one star because that is all it is, a discussion, without analysis, ideas, alternatives or business applications the book discusses rather than raises issues for the future.

Ostensibly the big switch is between today's corporate computing which has islands of individual automation to what Carr calls the world wide computer - basically the programmable internet. Carr's attempt to coin a new phrase - world wide computer, is one of the things that does not work in this book. It feels contrived and while the internet is undergoing fundamental change, the attempt at rebranding is an unnecessary distraction.

Overall, this is a good book and should be considered as part of the overall future of economics and business genre rather than a discussion of IT or technology. Carr is an editor at heart and that shows through in this book. 80% of the book is reviews and discussions of the works of other people. I counted at least 30 other books and authors that I have read and Carr uses to support his basic argument.

The book's primary weakness is in its lack of attention to business issues, strategies and business recommendations. As an editor, it's understandable that Carr would not know first hand how to run a company. But I would have expected a more balanced analysis of the issues. Carr almost exclusively talks with companies that are vendors of this new solution - the supply side. He is a booster for Google - not a bad thing in itself - but something that leaves the book unbalanced. Without case examples, a discussion of business decisions, and alternatives - the book is too general to be something to organize my company's future around.

As an anthology about technology's influence on the future it's pretty good. The book does not deliver on groundbreaking new ideas that will drive strategy - particularly not for people who have followed the development of the internet. If you have read Gilder, Negroponte, Davenport and Harris, Peters, Lewis, Tapscott, among others, then you will recognize many of the ideas in this book.

Carr's book is in fact a prime example of the future world he describes where individuals garner attention, form a social group and then extract value from that group. Carr garnered attention with IT Doesn't Matter, used that to polarize the business community into IT supporters and detractors - creating even more attention, and finally extracting value from the group in the form of speaking engagements and this book. So Carr has made the big switch and it is from traditional media to a new attention driven economy. (Read Davenport and Beck's book Attention Economy if you want to understand more)


Chapter by Chapter Review

The book is divided in to two parts. The first uses historical analysis to build the ideas that the Internet is following the same developmental path as electric power did 100 years ago. This idea is one of Carr's obsessions and featured throughout his writing. The second section discusses the economic, social and other issues associated with the Internet becoming the platform and marketplace for commerce.

Chapter 1: Burden's Wheel lays out Carr's overall argument from an academic perspective. It starts with the historical position of water power, the precursor to electricity, and then explains conceptually what these different technologies mean. This is a clear statement and one that is important to the book. Carr points out the unique economic impact of general purpose technologies - the few technologies that are the basis for a multitude of other economic activity.

Chapter 2: The Inventor and His Clear is a historical account of the early days of electricity. Well researched, this chapter is good reading for the business history buff than one looking to understand the arguments Carr is making. The chapter focuses largely on the development and adoption of electric power. It points out that electric power had some false starts such as Edison's instance on local DC plants and that it needed the development of some additional technologies to take off. As an analogy to computing and the internet, these examples fit very neatly - almost too neatly into Carr's argument.

Chapter 3: Digital Millwork discusses the recent history of the computer. This is intended to give the reader the opportunity to connect the history of the electricity at the turn of the 20th century with the development of computing at the turn of the 21st century. It works to a point. Straight comparisons between client service computing and DC power generation among others are partially accurate, but incomplete. Carr sees bandwidth as the savior of computing much in the same way that the dynamo and Tesla's AC power turned electric plants into regional power companies.

This chapter communicates Carr's basic complaint with current information technology - at least in this book. His complain on page 56 and 57 is that IT costs too much for what it delivers. Latter he talks about excess capacity in servers and computing capacity. This basic cost economics argument does not take into account the value generated by the existence of the applications that run on those servers and the fact that at the time business leaders, like their grand fathers before them did not have another choice.

Chapter 4: Goodbye, Mr. Gates holds his explanation of the future world - a future of virtual computing where physical location and therefore device based software licensing no longer exists. In the chapter, Mr. Carr is late to the game. Grid computing has been a developing factor for more than 10 years and will accelerate as this book popularizes the idea. The comments in this chapter are not particularly new for the technology aware but they are almost unabashedly positive in favor of Google, something that will continue for the rest of the book

Chapter 5: The White City turns away from a continued development of the technical ideas of virtualization and grid computing and moves back into a historical discussion of how electricity changed people's lives and societies. Again Carr is providing information to set the reader up to make a comparison to what the switch to the Internet might be. His discussion of Insull and Ford are interesting if brief.

Part Two of the book takes a curious turn ad Carr finishes his arguments about the programmable internet and then seeks to systematically undermine the value of that environment on which he says the future is based. He offers few ideas or solutions, just criticism or more appropriately the criticism of others.

Chapter 6 World Wide Computer returns to the notion of what the unbridled possibilities of the programmable internet might be. This chapter concentrates on how wonderful this world will be for the individual with infinite information and computing power available to them. Carr provides a clear example of a Ford Mustang enthusiast's ability to create their own multi-media blog/website/advertising site as an example of how wonderful the world will be. This chapter is the utopian chapter where we all can benefit; Carr will destroy most of those notions in latter chapters.

Here is where Carr discusses the future of corporate computing; giving the topic all of four paragraphs p. 117-118. The basic idea is that today's IT will fade away in the face of `business units and individuals who will be able to control the processing of information directly." For IT people, this is the end user computing argument. This is also the last word he makes on the subject of IT in the book.

Chapter 7: From Many to the Few is a discussion of the social impacts of a programmable internet where each runs their own personal business. Think Tom Peters and personal brand. This is the best chapter of the book and the most unusual Carr sets out to systematically point out the negative consequences of the assertions he makes in the previous chapters. Here he talks about the fact that fewer and fewer people will need to work in a global world of the programmable internet, that the utopia of equality and cottage industries envisioned by the web will not come to pass.

Chapter 8: The Great Unbundling talks about the move from mass markets to markets of one. The chapter also talks about the social implications of a web that connects like people creating a tribal and increasingly multi-polar world, rather than the world wide consciousness assumed to arise when education and communications levels increase.

Chapter 9 Fighting the Net discusses the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of free flowing information and the structural integrity of the net. This chapter again tears away at the foundation of the future that Carr lays out earlier. Normally in a book there would be public policy recommendations to address these points. They are not here giving this chapter more the feeling of journalism rather than analysis and insight.

Chapter 10 A Spider's Web addresses the personal privacy issues associated with the web and... Read more ›

53 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An extended defense of a utopian vision of the IT future first published in Carr's HBR article, May 10, 2008

By 

Nikolai N Bezroukov "kievite" (Budd Lake, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (Hardcover)

Save your money. This book contains nothing but an extended defense of a Utopian vision of the IT future first published in Carr's HBR article. Limited understanding of underlying IT technologies, haziness and lack of concrete detailed examples (obscurantism) are typical marks of Carr's style. Carr used focus on IT shortcomings as a smokescreen to propose a new utopia: users are mastering complex IT packages and perform all functions previously provided by IT staff, while "in the cloud" software service providers fill the rest. This is pretty fine humor, the caricature reminding me mainframe model, but not much more.

His analogies are extremely superficial and are completely unconvincing (Google actually can greatly benefit from owning an electrical generation plant or two :-) Complexity of IT systems has no precedents in human history. That means that analogies with railways and electrical grid are deeply and irrevocably flawed. They do not capture the key characteristics of the IT technology: its unsurpassed complexity and Lego type flexibility. IT became a real nerve system of the modern organizations. Not the muscle system or legs :-)

Carr's approach to IT is completely anti-historic. Promoting his "everything in the cloud" Utopia as the most important transformation of IT ever, he forgot (or simply does not know) that IT already experienced several dramatic transformations due to new technologies which emerged in 60th, 70th and 90th. Each of those transformations was more dramatic and important then neo-mainframe revolution which he tried to sell as "bright future of IT" and a panacea from all IT ills. For example, first mainframes replaced "prehistoric" computers. Then minicomputers challenged mainframes ("glass wall" datacenters) and PC ended mainframe dominance (and democratized computing.). In yet another transformation the Internet and TCP/IP (including wireless) converted datacenters to their modern form. What Carr views as the next revolution is just a blip on the screen in comparison with those events in each of which the technology inside the datacenter and on user desks dramatically changed.

As for his "everything in the cloud" software service providers there are at least three competing technologies which might sideline it: application streaming, virtualization (especially virtual appliances), and "cloud in the box". "In the cloud" software services is just one of several emerging technical trends and jury is still out how much market share each of them can grab. Application streaming looks like direct and increasingly dangerous competitor for the "in the cloud" software services model. But all of them are rather complementary technologies with each having advantages in certain situations and none can be viewed as a universal solution.

The key advantage of application streaming is that you use local computing power for running the application, not a remote server. That removes the problem of latency and bandwidth problems inherent in transmitting video stream generated by GUI interface on the remote server (were the application is running) to the client. Also modern laptops have tremendous computing power that is very expensive and not easy to match in remote server park. Once you launch the application on the client (from a shortcut ) the remote server streams (like streaming video or audio) the necessary application files to your PC and the application launches. This is done just once. After that application works as if it is local. Also only required files are sent (so if you are launching Excel you do NOT get those libraries that are shared with MS Word if it is already installed).

Virtualization promises more agile and more efficient local datacenters and while it can be used by "in the cloud" providers (Amazon uses it), it also can undercut "in the cloud" software services model in several ways. First of all it permits packaging a set of key enterprise applications as "virtual appliances". the latter like streamed applications run locally, store data locally, are cheaper, have better response time and are more maintainable. This looks to me as a more promising technical approach for complex sets of applications with intensive I/O requirements. For example, you can deliver LAMP stack appliance (Linux-Apache-PHP-MySQL) and use it on a local server for running your LAMP-applications (for example helpdesk) enjoying the same level of quality and sophistication of packaging and tuning as in case of remote software providers. But you do not depend on WAN as users connect to it using LAN which guarantees fast response time. And your data are stored locally (but if you wish they can be backed up remotely to Amazon or to other remote storage provider).

The other trend is the emergence of higher level of standardization of datacenters ("cloud in the box" or "datacenter in the box" trend). It permits cheap prepackaged local datacenters to be installed everywhere. Among examples of this trend are standard shipping container-based datacenters which are now sold by Sun and soon will be sold by Microsoft. They already contain typical services like DNS, mail, file sharing, etc preconfigured. For a fixed cost an organization gets set of servers capable of serving mid-size branch or plant. In this case the organization can save money by avoiding paying monthly "per user" fees -- a typical cost recovery model of software service providers. It also can be combined with previous two models: it is easy to stream both applications and virtual appliances to the local datacenter from central location. For a small organization such a datacenter now can be pre-configured in a couple of servers using Xen or VMware plus necessary routers and switches and shipped in a small rack.

I would like to stress that the power and versatility of modern laptop is the factor that should not be underestimated. It completely invalidates Carr's cloudy dream of users voluntarily switching to network terminal model inherent is centralized software services ( BTW mainframe terminals and, especially, "glass wall datacenters" were passionately hated by users). Remotely running applications have a mass appeal only in very limited cases (webmail). I think that users will fight tooth and nail for the preservation of the level of autonomy provided by modern laptops. Moreover, in no way users will agree to the sub-standard response time and limited feature set of "in the cloud" applications as problems with Google apps adoption demonstrated.

While Google apps is an interesting project which is now used in many small organizations instead of their own mail and calendar infrastructure, they can serve as a litmus test for the difficulties of replacing "installed" applications with "in the cloud" applications. First of all, if we are talking about replacing Open Office or Microsoft Office, Google apps functionality is really, really limited. At the same time Google have spend a lot of money and efforts creating them but never got any significant traction and/or sizable return on investment. After several years of existence this product did not even come close to the functionality of Open Office to say nothing about Microsoft Office. To increase penetration Google recently started licensing them to Salesforce and other firms. That means that the whole idea might be flawed because even such an extremely powerful organization as Google with its highly qualified staff and huge server power of datacenters cannot create an application suit that can compete with preinstalled on laptop applications, which means cannot compete with the convenience and speed of running applications locally on modern laptop.

In case of corporate editions the price is also an issue ($50 per user per year for Google apps vs. $ 220 for Microsoft Office Professional). In no way they ook like a bargain if we assume five-seven years life span for the MS Office. The same situation exists for home users: price-wise Microsoft Office can be now classified as shareware (Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 which includes Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote costs ~$100 or ~$25 per application ). So for home users Google needs to provide Google apps for free, which taking into account the amount of design efforts and complexity of the achieving compatibility, is not a very good way of investing available cash. Please note that Microsoft can at any time add the ability to stream Office and other applications to laptops and put "pure play" cloud applications providers in a really difficult position: remote servers need to provide the same quality of interface and amount of computing power per user as the user enjoys on a modern laptop. That also suggests existence of some principal limitations of "in the cloud" approach for any complex application domain: SAP has problems with moving SAP/R3 to the cloud too and recently decided to scale back its efforts in this direction.

All-in-all computing power of a modern dual core 3 GHz laptops with 4G of memory and 200G hard drives represent a serious challenge for "in the cloud" software services providers. This power makes for them difficult to attract individual users money outside advertising-based or other indirect models. It's even more difficult for them "to shake corporate money loose": corporate users value the independence of locally installed on laptop applications and the ability to store data locally. Not everybody wants to share with Google their latest business plans.

Therefore Carr's 2003 vision looks in 2008 even less realistic then it used to be five years earlier. As during those five years datacenters actually continued to grow, Carr's value as a tech trends forecaster is open for review.

Another problem with Carr neo-mainframes vision is propaganda of... Read more ›

49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Utility Computing, December 26, 2007

By 

Thomas E. Hayden "Tom Hayden" (Evanston, IL, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (Hardcover)

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.