The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr

And now for something completelysort of different. Since every reader has specific tastes, I realized no amount of my own reading was going to cover every kind of topic out there. Matt Stratton, of Good Old Rock, has helped quite a bit with getting Stacked up and running, so I asked him to guest post with a technology-related book review. Despite having a few weeks to read and write, he was cramming to finish by yesterday’s deadline and compared writing this to working on a book review for school. He’s lucky I don’t own any red pens.

“Cloud Computing” is a hot buzzword these days–and it’s a real challenge to define it simply. Let’s put it this way, I’ve been wanting to write on my own blog about a LOT of cloud topics over the past two months, and the reason I haven’t written a single post on the topic yet: I haven’t been able to summarize what it actually means. However, since I put myself on the spot by promising Christina a guest post reviewing a book that touches on cloud topics, I have no choice. I think maybe I’ll take the lazy way out and not define it clearly–and see if by the end you faithful readers will have been able to understand it.

Nicholas Carr first gained notoriety for an article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review titled IT Doesn’t Matter. He followed this up with the book Does IT Matter?, which asserted that Information Technology no longer provides companies with inherent competitive advantage. In The Big Switch, Carr has a central conceit that the development of cloud (or as he refers to it, “utility”) computing will follow the same development (with similar impacts as well) as centralized electricity and power did in the late 19th century. Additionally, Carr explores the concept of what he calls the “World Wide Computer” and evaluates the “ideal” that the Internet can deliver, and then identifies how this ideal is unattainable.

Looking at the first part of the book, we learn that in the early days of industrialization, each factory provided its own power, which, before electricity, meant that manufacturers needed to locate near the source of power, such as a stream for a waterwheel. Even after the development of electricity, factories still created their own power, which was inherently wasteful. It took Edison’s own clerk, Samuel Insull, to realize that by centralizing power and selling it as a utility, economies of scale could be leveraged and power could be made so much more economical. For example, not all customers use the same amount of power at the same time. If you imagine having two customers for power , one who runs third shift and one that lights his office 9-5, you really only need enough power for one customer, but you can sell it to both.

According to Carr, today most IT shops are like the factories of old–we all have our own data centers with racks and racks of servers that sit idle most of the time. This is wasteful and inefficient. Carr argues that centralized computing, sold as a utility, can hit the same economies of scale that centralized power did for Insull. This also frees companies up to focus on those things that do provide competitive advantage–stop spending money and effort to “keep the lights on,” so to speak–and put your workers’ skullsweat on innovation, focusing on the core competencies of your business.

In the second half of The Big Switch, Carr switches tacks (no pun intended) to discuss how the Internet is an example of a distributing computing environment–one which he refers to as The World Wide Computer. Tackling topics such as crowdsourcing, distribution of content, and, as is required in any book about the Internet these days, the “long tail.”

One of the most interesting things Carr discusses is how we believe that the Internet is the great equalizer and how it should be the ultimate melting pot. But in reality, the Internet makes it much easier for us to simply associate with those who already think the same way as we do. We tend to gravitate to discussion forums and social networks populated by like-minded individuals, and we also put our eyeballs on news outlets and blogs that echo the views we already have. We’re far less likely to read a blog or belong to a discussion forum with people who differ from us, which means that we learn less about others, rather than more.

That last point is the one I took the most away from this book. Recently, I’ve become somewhat annoyed that a fair portion of the people that I follow on Twitter have a differing political opinion than I do, and I toyed with the notion of un-following these folks, as some of their tweets started to bug me. However, when I considered what I learned from The Big Switch, I determined that exposing myself to differing opinions was good for me–and that isolating myself into an online bubble where everyone agrees with me is detrimental to my development as a person, and has a very negative impact on our society as a whole.

The world is changing–the World Wide Computer is here. We are forever changed by it, just as our great-grandparents were forever changed by electricity. As Carr says in the final chapter (“iGod”):

The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet’s power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers…The artificial intelligence we’re creating may turn out to be our own.

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