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The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google Edition Unstated

by Nicholas Carr (Author)

4.3 281 ratings

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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.

ISBN-10

9780393062281
ISBN-13

978-0393062281
Edition

Edition Unstated
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

January 17, 2008
Language

English
Dimensions

6.4 x 1 x 9.6 inches
Print length

276 pages
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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 readablefor nontechies, tooas 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

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0393062287
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Edition Unstated (January 17, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 276 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780393062281
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393062281
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.22 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 1 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #305,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #46 in Information Theory
- #117 in Human-Computer Interaction (Books)
- #12,528 in Unknown

Customer Reviews:
4.3 281 ratings

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Nicholas Carr

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Nicholas Carr is an acclaimed writer whose work focuses on technology, economics, and culture. His books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," have been translated into more than 25 languages. He is a visiting professor of sociology at Williams College in Massachusetts and was formerly executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.

A New York Times bestseller when it was first published in 2010 and now hailed as “a modern classic,” "The Shallows" remains a touchstone for debates on technology’s effects on our thoughts and perceptions. A new, expanded edition of "The Shallows" was published in 2020. Carr’s 2014 book "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us," which the New York Review of Books called a “chastening meditation on the human future,” examines the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His latest book, "Utopia Is Creepy," collects his best essays, blog posts, and other writings from the past dozen years. The collection is “by turns wry and revelatory,” wrote Discover.

Carr is also the author of two other influential books, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google" (2008), which the Financial Times called “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing,” and the widely discussed and debated "Does IT Matter?" (2004).

Carr has written for many newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Nature, and MIT Technology Review. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting,” have been collected in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. Carr is a former member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school. Since 2005, he has written the popular blog Rough Type, at www.roughtype.com. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University.

More information about Carr's work can be found at his website, www.nicholascarr.com. [Author photo by Scott Keneally.]

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4.3 out of 5

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Geronimo

Fantastic Writing

Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2021

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The author must now be in the top 10% of my all-time favourites because of his mastery of language, his simplicity of terms, and his ability to spin a network of information into a coherent package. I have not read this author before but will investigate his other works. Having just spent 8 months repairing my own 4 defunct macs, this book explains the development of computers and why apps/programs are moving towards the net only. Scary good. Sometimes stopping and smelling the roses means taking what little spare time you have and read books like this--both enlightening and time saving. Kudos to the author.

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O. Halabieh

Account of Utility Computing!

Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2013

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Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- "What made large-scale electric utilities possible was a series of scientific and engineering breakthroughs - in electricity generation and transmission as well as in the design of electric motors - but what ensured their triumph was not technology but economics."

2- "At a purely economic level, the similarities between electricity and information technology are even more striking. Both are what economists call general purpose technologies...they can both be delivered efficiently over a network."

3- "If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth-century society - that made us who we are - the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century."

4- "What the fiber-optic Internet does for computing is exactly what the alternating current network did for electricity: it makes the location of the equipment unimportant to the user. But it does more than that. Because the internet has been designed to accommodate any type of computer and any form of digital information, it also plays the role of Insull's rotary converter: it allows disparate and formerly incompatible machines to operate together as a single system. It creates harmony out of a cacophony. By providing a universal medium for data transmission and translation, the Net is spurring the creation of centralized computing plants that can serve thousands or millions of customers simultaneously. What companies used to have no choice but to supply themselves, they can now purchase as a service for a simple fee. And that means they can finally free themselves from their digital millwork."

5- "It will take many years for the utility computing system to mature. Like Edison and Insull before them, the pioneers of the new industry will face difficult business and technical challenges. They'll need to figure out the best ways to meter and set prices for different kinds of services. They'll need to become more adept at balancing loads and managing diversity factors as demand grows. They'll need to work with governments to establish effective regulatory regimes. They'll need to achieve new levels of security, reliability, and efficiency. Most daunting of all they'll need to convince big companies to give up control over their private systems and begin to dismantle the data centers into which they've plowed so much money. But these challenges will be met just as they were met before. The economics of computing have changed, and it's the new economics that are now guiding progress. the PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age."

6- "Virtualization allows companies - or the utilities that serve them - to regain the high capacity utilization that characterized the mainframe age while gaining even more flexibility that they had during the PC age. It offers the best of both worlds."

7- "Some of the old-line companies will succeed in making the switch to the new model of computing; others will fail. But all of them would be wise to study the examples of General Electric and Westinghouse. A hundred years ago, both these companies were making a lot of money selling electricity production components and systems to individual companies. That business disappeared as big utilities took over electricity supply. But GE and Westinghouse were able to reinvent themselves. They became leading suppliers of generators and other equipment to the new utilities, and they also operated or invested in utilities themselves. Most important of all, they built vast new businesses supplying electric appliances to consumers - businesses that only became possible after the arrival of large scale electric utilities."

8- "When applications have no physical form, when they can be delivered as digital services over a network, the constraints disappear. Computing is also much more modular than electricity generation. Not only can applications be provided by different utilities, but even the basic building blocks of computing - data storage, data processing, data transmission - can be broken up into different services supplied from different locations by different companies. Modularity reduces the likelihood that the new utilities will form service monopolies, and it gives us, as the users of utility computing, a virtually unlimited array of options."

9- "Not only will the Internet tend to divide people with different views, in other words, it will also tend to magnify the differences."

10- "All technological change is generational change. 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. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It's in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be."

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T. L. Flynn

Take the guess work out of the cloud

Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2010

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As I went to read the The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr, I found myself a bit skeptical of what he would write and how he would possibly bend truths to make a point. I couldn't have been more wrong. I found his book to be based on a series of well documented facts and events that lead us to where the web is today and theories on where we are going tomorrow with the cloud/world wide computer. It was fascinating to read...I found I did not want to put the book down and when I did I wanted to tell my colleagues about it and get their perspectives...and to also share with my cutomers so they can see the evolution and future of the web as well. I have and will continue to recommend others read this book to give perspective and understanding of again where have been and what the possibilities and probablities are in the future. Definitely a thumbs up!

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Andrew Sanchez

A grid-cloud comparison

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2011

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In his book, The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr related the history of the electric grid from the invention by Edison to the centralization of the grid and used it as a basis for the thesis of the book which is to derive a parallel for the evolution of information technology and processing. The underlying theme in the book is that as a technology matures, it becomes commoditized to gain efficiencies in production and usage and, eventually, it becomes indispensable but also brings with it unintended consequences. The book was divided in two parts which differ in theme and dynamics. The first part was historic and revolved around technology while the second part centered on social implications of technology.
The first section is covered electric and data technology and their evolution. Carr began his discussion with a comprehensive account of electrical energy generation. He started chapter one with the Burden's Wheel and explained that such invention allowed for the increase of productivity but was limited when kinetic energy could not be stored or transported for more than short distances within a factory. Additionally, kinetic energy from the Burden's Wheel required the use of physical conduits such as levers, pulleys and gears. The underlying power source of the Burden's Wheel was running water; therefore, industrial uses of its power were limited.
The second chapter included a detailed account of Edison's venture into the Direct Current (DC) generation as well as the subsequent advent of Alternate Current (AC) which allowed for the centralization of the power grid. In this chapter, Carr initiated the comparison of the electric grid to the information technology (IT) data center. His main idea behind the comparison was that as data processing becomes more and more commoditized, it no longer advantageous for companies to keep their own data center and incur the costs of keeping up an IT staff and operations facility when processing can be provided centrally at a much cheaper cost.
The rest of part covered analogy after analogy that attempts to draw a parallel between the evolutions of the electrical grid and the computing cloud. In chapter three, Carr covered the history of the computer from the early inceptions to the modern data center. The analogies stop making sense when the chapter cites the availability of cheap and vast bandwidth as the basis for cloud computing and AC power. While bandwidth and AC may be similar at some level, AC is pure power while bandwidth is not. He later corrects the analogy and points to the grid but the comparison continues to be a rather weak one from that point on; mainly because he is comparing two very different technologies with two distinct uses and levels of sophistication.
Later in part one he predicts the downfall of Bill Gates and his monopoly on computing as well as the inefficiencies of the data center. In his own logic, Carr argues that computers will become appliances that will require little in the way of customization and that processing and storage will take place entirely in the cloud. While this is happening with some success, it is not realistic to think that all processing can be in the hands of a few companies with centralized locations. The reason is that unlike the electric grid, data processing needs vary widely among companies. Many will undoubtedly require no more than what the cloud offers while others will necessitate vast amounts of processing and storage; not to mention security.
The IT industry has had some successes with the cloud and virtualization but there have also been a lot of failures which have forced companies to switch back to in-house processing and storage. The modularization of the cloud allows for efficient operations but even those operations are nothing more than big data centers which in turn will have their own inefficiencies. Carr makes no distinction between the centralized outsourced data center and the electrical grid with centralized power generation. Nevertheless, they cannot be compared at face value because, unlike electricity generation, processing and storage cannot be done for everyone with one solution. In other words, the electricity current that is used by a residence is only slightly different than the electricity used by the Pentagon and differs only in voltage. However, the processing and storage required by the two are vastly different. The Pentagon will not put its data where it can be reached by someone other than their employees or where it can be made unavailable by some system or power failure.
Overall the first half of the book was very fundamental in nature and included very accurate information about existing technologies and companies in IT. The analogies are at times not the best but Carr makes them work under a certain applied logic. The intended reader should be someone with some knowledge of IT as some of the assumptions and conclusions made by Carr require some analysis and objective questioning.
The second part brings the topic of the cloud to the present and Carr explains the promises of the internet and the worldwide computer. In Carr's view the internet is a web of computers that somehow morphed into a collective and he reasons that the "big computer" is better than the individual computers which act independently. One huge misunderstanding on Carr's part is the notion that the worldwide computer acts alone and by its own means. He mentions the advancement of knowledge, innovation and modularity which are all accessible via the web browser. What he does not seem to realize is that computing takes many forms and some are apt for modularization but some are not. Appliances are fine but eventually a web browser has to run on something. Computers fundamentally have not changed at all since the first Apple II. Computers need input, they process the input, they store the processed input and they output something. Appliances are a variation but not much else. All the innovations happened at the higher OSI layers; the top two layers, presentation and application, to be exact. While DC and AC are very different, the cloud and desktops and appliances are not all that different at their core. The cloud is merely a bunch of computers hooked up in a way that they can serve many users at once. This is really not much different than the mainframes and Wyse terminals from the 1970's and 1980's.
The big message that Carr wants to deliver throughout the book is that IT is on its last stand and that computing and end-users will require nothing more than a device with a browser to access all the vaults of information available on the web. What he does not realize, again, is that the cloud needs a lot of maintaining, upgrading, securing, cooling, backing up, cleaning and updating. End users will probably not be able to do all those things. It will require IT specialist to perform those functions. Carr failed to mention that moving the electric generation from the factory-based DC plant to the AC grid did not do away with electrical engineers or the equipment needed to generate electricity; it merely centralized the need.
The rest of the book takes on some interesting topics such as the unexpected consequences of the grid and the elaboration of home appliances which made housewives lives more isolated and even harder, to some degree, than before the electrification of the home. Carr makes the analogy to the notion that the internet would bring the world under a common collective which would interact without geographical and cultural barriers. Carr makes the assertion that the opposite occurred as the internet public became segmented into subcultures and special interest sites. While the arguments make sense, it is not clear where Carr got the idea that people expected the internet to bring the world into a common culture. Since no other medium before the internet had such an effect, there would be little reason to believe that a new medium do somehow erode culture and special interests.
The rest of the book is devoted to topics that the author should not have included such as security and privacy. He describes how easy it is to get anyone's surfing history and buying habits. While this may be easy for an internet service provider (ISP) it is rather difficult for an average user. Carr clearly got into realms of technology he does not fully understand. Although, Carr is able to recite protocol fundamentals, he is not aware of the vast complexity that exists in trying to read packets across switched subnets and behind NATted segments. Unfortunately, he was not able to rescue the end of the book as well as he admirably wrote the beginning.
Overall the book The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr provides much useful information on technology and contains accurate information on IT industry players such as Akamai, 3Tera and Citrix, he got entangled in topics he does not appear to fully understand. The value of the book lies in its detailed narration of the history of the electrical grid, computing and major events in the advent of the cloud. The book also includes well reasoned information on the unintended consequences of technology on society. Carr's book should not be adopted as a technical piece but rather a reasonable analogy between the electrical grid and cloud computing. There is no formal research, new models or any academic value; however, it presents a good representation into the popular view of the modularization of processing and storage.

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Nikita I.

Very good for non-technical people

Reviewed in Germany on September 29, 2018

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A very good book which gives an overview about how technology changes our lives. It is written in a very clear manner so that a reader who is not deeply involved into the matter will understand. The author did a big research. This book is a definitemust-read!

Michel

Deep focus on business changes

Reviewed in Brazil on January 19, 2015

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The authoe explained on an easy way of how complete markets changed when the technology evolves. Going from electricity to Henry Ford and now how cloud computing is changing the way we work and how we interact with each other.

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Ari.s.

interessante

Reviewed in Italy on July 9, 2016

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interessante e piacevole da leggere. specie nella seconda parte sono toccate tematica attuali e riesce a far riflettere su aspetti a volte sottovalutati.
assolutamente consigliato

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Pablo

Must para cualquier emprendedor

Reviewed in Spain on April 5, 2016

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Gran libro aunque demasiado extenso y repetitivo a veces. Gran tesis sobre la evolución del mundo conectado. Una pena no contar con una copia en español

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VeerJain

Five Stars

Reviewed in India on January 30, 2016

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wow. must read, if one want to know how datacenters are changing the technology landscape.

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