The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: utility age, utility computing, The Big Switch, World Wide Computer, Spider's Web (more...)

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

'Information is born free, but everywhere is found in chains.' So Nicholas Carr—in his latest and characteristically stimulating challenge to conventional thinking about technology—might have paraphrased Rousseau. (Democracy )

The Big Switch ... will almost certainly influence a large audience. Carr persuasively argues that we're moving from the era of the personal computer to an age of utility computing - by which he means the expansion of grid computing, the distribution of computing and storage over the Internet, until it accounts for the bulk of what the human race does digitally. And he nicely marshals his historical analogies, detailing how electricity delivered over a grid supplanted the various power sources used during most of the 19th century ... I also suspect he's right to suggest that in a decade or so, many things we now believe permanent will have disappeared. (Technology Review )

The Big Switch explains the future of computing in terms so simple I can understand them. (Ed Cone - Greensboro News-Record )

The Big Switch is thought-provoking and an enjoyable read, and the history of American electricity that makes up the first half of the book is riveting stuff. Further, the book broadly reinforces the point that it's always wise to distrust utopias, technological or otherwise. (The New York Post )

A leading technological rabble-rouser prognosticates a world beyond Web 2.0. [Carr's] broader sociological observations are punctuated by a pair of ominously prescient chapters about privacy issues and cyberterrorism. (Kirkus Reviews )

An enjoyable and thought-provoking read. (GigaOm )

Carr is one of the more cogent writers on the economic and social implications of the changes sweeping through corporate data centres. (Financial Times )

Carr may take a somewhat apocalyptic view of the vast technological and social issues which a move to utility computing will raise, not least those of privacy, ownership and access, but he makes a compelling case for its desirability in a world where the network is pervasive. Whether we go gently into this world is, of course, up to us, but with the insight offered here we will at least be prepared to understand the consequences of our choices earlier in the process rather than later. (New Humanist )

Carr stimulates, provokes and entertains superbly. (Information Age )

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. (Publishers Weekly )

Considered and erudite. (The Telegraph )

Lucid and accessible ... [Carr's] account is one of high journalism, rather than of a social or computer scientist. His book should be read by anyone interested in the shift from the world wide web and its implications for industry, work and our information environment. (Times Higher Education Supplement )

Magisterial ... Draws an elegant and illuminating parallel between the late-19th-century electrification of America and today's computing world. (Salon )

Mr. Carr is always interesting. (Washington Times )

Mr. Carr's provocations are destined to influence CEOs and the boards and investors that support them as companies grapple with the constant change of the digital age. (The Wall Street Journal )

Nick Carr has written a meditation on the loss of the old when confronted by the new, the loss of the incumbents' advantage when history shifts under them, the loss of data control to third parties, and the loss of sovereignty to institutions and other actors we can't control. (Public CIO )

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 ... Scary? No doubt. But as we prepare for the World Wide Computer, it's not a bad idea to consider its dark side. (Business Week )

Starred Review. Carr created a huge rift in the business community with his first book, Does IT Matter?, challenging the conventional wisdom that information technology provides a competitive advantage. Here he examines the future of the Internet, which he says may one day completely replace the desktop PC as all computing services are delivered over the Net as a utility, the Internet morphing into one giant 'World Wide Computer.' ... Carr warns that the downside of the World Wide Computer may mean further concentration of wealth for the few, and the loss of jobs, privacy, and the depth of our culture. (Booklist )

The first serious examination of 'Web 2.0' in book form. (The Register )

While technological innovation is largely the creation of idealistic geniuses spurred on by utopian visions, Carr points out, it is rapidly co-opted by the incumbent in power and turned to other purposes ... Technology may be the ultimate tool or even the ultimate psychedelic, but do we really want to become utterly dependent on something about which we have essentially no say? And as for those Utopian visions, do we really share them? (San Francisco Chronicle )

[#4 on Newsweek's "Fifty Books For Our Times":] You've heard of 'cloud computing,' but let's be honest, you really don't know what it means. Or why it's going to change everything. (Newsweek )

[W]idely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement. (Christian Science Monitor )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; Reprint edition (January 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393333949
• ISBN-13: 978-0393333947
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,057 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

170 of 189 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	M. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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 ›

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

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

By	Thomas E. Hayden (Detroit, MI 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.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Worthwhile, One Major Flaw, March 3, 2008

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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

This is a very worthwhile easy to absorb book. The author is thoughtful, well-spoken, with good notes and currency as of 2007.

The one major flaw in the book is the uncritical comparison of cloud computing with electricity as a utility. That analogy fails when one recognizes that the current electrical system wastes 50% of the power going down-stream, and has become so unreliable that NSA among others is building its own private electrical power plant--with a nuclear core, one wonders? While the author is fully aware of the dangers to privacy and liberty, and below I recap a few of his excellent points, he disappoints in not recognizing that localized resilience and human scale are the core of humanity and community, and that what we really need right now, which John Chambers strangely does not appear willing to offer, is a solar-powered server-router that gives every individual Application Oriented Network control at the point of creation (along with anonymous banking and Grug distributed search), while also creating local pods that can operate independently of the cloud while also blocking Google perverted new programmable search, wherer what you see is not what's in your best interests, but rather what the highest bidder paid to force into your view.

The author cites one source as saying that Google computation can do a task at one tenth of the cost. To learn more, find my review, "Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator" and follow the bread crumbs.

The author touches on software as a service, and I am reminded of the IBM interst in "Services Science." He has a high regard for Amazon Web Services, as I do, and I was fascinated by his suggestion that Amazon differs from Google, Amazon doing virtualization while Google does task optimization (with computational mathematics). Not sure that is accurate, Google can flip a bit tomorrow and put bankers, entertainers, data service providers, and publishers out of business.

I completely enjoyed th discussion of the impact of electrification and the rise of the middle class, of the migration from World Wide Web to World Wide Computer, and of the emergence of a gift ecnomy.

The author also touches on the erosion of the middle class, citing Jagdish Bhagwati and Ben Bernake as saying that it is the Internet rather than globalization that is hurting the middle class (globalization moved the low cost jobs, the Internet moved the highly-educated jobs).

I was shocked to learn that Google can listen to my background sound via the microphone, meaning that Google is running the equivalent of a warrantless audio penetration of my office. "Do No Evil?" This is very troubling.

Page 161: "A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seemsx oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization." Well said. The only thing more shocking to me is the utter complacency of the top management at Amazon, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft. Search for the article by Steve Arnold, the world's foremost non-Google expert on Google, look for <Google Pressure Wave: Do the Big Boys Feel It?>.

The author touches on Internet utility to terrorists, and our military's vulnerability, but he does not get as deeply into this as he could have. The fact is the Chinese can take out our telecommunications satellites anytime they want, and they are not only hacking into our computers via the Internet, they also appear to have perfected accessing "stand-alone" computers via the electrical connection. See <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>.

The portion ofthe book I most appreciated was the authors discussion of lost privacy and individuality. He says "Computer systems are not at their core technologies of emancipation. They are technologies of control." He goes on to point out that even a decentralized cloud network can be programmed to monitor and control, and that is precisely where Google is going, monitoring employees and manipulating consumers.

He touches on semantic web but misses Internet Economy Meta Language (Pierre Levy) and Open Hypertextdocument System (Doug Englebart).

He credits Google founders with wanting to get to all information in all languages all the time, and I agree that their motives are largely worthy, but they are out of control--a suprnational entity with zero oversight. I can easily envision the day coming when in addition to 27 secessionist movements across the USA, we will hundreds of virtual secessions in which communities choose to define trusted computing as localized computing.

The book ends beautifully, by saying we will not know where IT is going until our children, the first generation to be wired from day one, become adults.

A few other books I recommend:
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Age of Missing Information
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Escaping the Matrix: How We the People can change the world
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace