The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
Book Review: Interesting History plus Future Insight
Summary: 5 Stars
This book begins with an interesting history of the impact of electricity and then shifts to providing insight into where we're headed with Information Technology.
It's a quick, easy and worthwhile read.
It amazes me just how much has changed since my grandparents time, how rapidly things are changing today and how much faster they will be changing for my grandchildren. Will my grandchildren indeed be forced to decide to remain as humans as we know them or become post humans? Carr touches on this subject in his last chapter titled "iGod".
For insight into the coming era of post humans, read "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil or just wait for the movie with the same title to be released later this year.
Book Review: Very insightful and an excellent read
Summary: 5 Stars
Nick Carr is the author who made a big splash a few years ago with the controversial book Does IT Matter? CIOs and computer geeks around the world were irritated by Carr's suggestion that IT no longer offers organizations a competitive advantage. Interesting concept, but I never bought into it either.
Don't let that turn you off from Carr's latest book, The Big Switch. I finished reading it earlier this week and found it to be a very interesting and well-researched work. Carr's premise this time is that the world of computers has much in common with the history and evolution of electricity. The Big Switch taught me a lot about development of that wall outlet we take for granted; although that might sound like a boring subject, Carr makes it engaging and really caused the light in my head to go on (no pun intended) with his analogy to the computer industry.
Have you ever had e-mail problems at your office? Maybe the main server goes down or some other unusual event occurs, causing you to lose your e-mail/web connection. It happens just about everywhere at some point. But have you noticed how reliable a service like Gmail is? I'm pretty sure that in the 5+ years I've been using Gmail I've never run into a service outage. Ever.
That's one of the points in The Big Switch: Just like when companies who used to generate their own power eventually switched over to central power stations as they started to appear, many of the services provided by your company's IT department (e-mail, storage, etc.) should be instead be outsourced and centralized for greater efficiencies and reliability.
It all comes down to having your organization focus on doing what it does best and outsourcing the rest. Sure, you might have a great IT department today, but can it really compete with the service levels, reliability and cost structure of some of the better outsource solutions? Even if this doesn't result in a dramatic, wholesale shift in the long term, it's clear that it makes a lot of sense for select applications and will continue to become a more viable approach going forward. Hmmm...maybe Carr was right all along and IT really doesn't matter!
Very good book. Highly recommended.
Book Review: Any collection strong in computer trends needs this.
Summary: 5 Stars
THE BIG SWITCH: REWIRING THE WORLD, FROM EDISON TO GOOGLE examines where computers are taking the world: while this could also have been featured in our Computer Shelf area, it's reviewed here for its wider importance to any general-interest collection strong in social trends and issues. It provides a historical analogy and analysis of changing methods of industry power, explaining how computing is undergoing a revolution akin to the modern electric grid where computing is moving from private PCs to massive data-sharing centers. Any collection strong in computer trends needs this.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Book Review: Very Worthwhile, One Major Flaw
Summary: 4 Stars
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
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
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
Book Review: Where the future is headed.
Summary: 5 Stars
This book was extremely interesting, not the least because it's right down the alley of what my company (NetSuite) does. I sat in my hotel room late one night devouring it. Despite all the ups and downs of the stock market, I believe Carr that we will continue to watch life change thanks to technology and the Internet in ways we can't even fathom right now, just as electricity changed things one hundred years ago. It was exiting to think about. And yet, as I read the second half of the book, I also realized that there was a dark side to the Internet, some of which I knew but some of what I hadn't considered. So on the other what's coming should make us "dread this inevitable future." It's exciting and just a little bit scary, but we should go forward with more excitement than fear.