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: "Pancake People" and the Darker Side of the Net
Summary: 3 Stars
The best part of the book details the dark side of the Internet. For example, the work of Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne in determining the balkanizing effect of the Internet on social norms is mentioned. Anyone trying to understand social networking (Facebook, Myspace) should be familiar with their work. It is sobering to realize that despite all of the hype, the Internet is in fact making us more isolated in our opinions and attitudes. Carr highlights this area well but I wish he went into even more detail.
"Pancake People" refers to Richard Foreman's description about people on the Internet being a mile wide and an inch deep. Carr describes how the technology behind the Internet (filters, etc) actually compounds this problem.
One of the author's best insights comes when he takes issue with the whole concept behind AI (artificial intelligence). He states that instead of computers becoming more human-like in their thinking, it is we who could become more computer-like in our thinking. As a humanist who grew up loving technology, I find this scenario frightening because it hits close to home. The comments (included in the book) from the co-founders of Google about creating a brain-computer interface reminded me of the "Borg" from Star Trek. For those interested, the Borg were a commentary on the communistic, totalitarian effects of unfettered technology (nanobots, brain/computer interfacing).
Book Review: Very little insight
Summary: 2 Stars
This book reads like an extended magazine article. It is written at a non-technical level for a general audience. While some of the topics addresse are clearly disrputive / revolutionary in nature this book merely skims the surface and offers no real depth of thought on the subjects. The casual thinking represented here would have been interesting two or three years ago. I didn't take away any insights of interest. Book Review: The History of Power Generation
Summary: 1 Stars
After reading the book, the summation or description provided by Amazon above captures the core of the author's message. The first part of the book drags you through the beginnings of the electric power generation industry and how it grew and developed into what we have today. The author then uses this as an analogy to support his view that "utility computing" will replace corporate datacenters we have today. This long history wasn't necessary for the point to be delivered.
One thing this is frequently skipped over is hardware as a service and it's implementation and role that it plays in the growth and success of SaaS.
The author touched on some of the social and business impacts he sees and the impact that it has had on anyone that creates content that can be digitized. The rest of the book covered various observations about the impact of the Internet on society and business that can be found in just about any other Web 2.0 book out there.
This book continues the trend of taking a magazine article that touches the touches on the epicenter of Internet 2.0 that is so popular. "Everything is Miscellaneous" is another example. My opinion is that this book should have stayed as a magazine article. I don't recommend it unless it's the only Web 2.0 book you read.
Book Review: A pretty good book, with some serious flaws
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a pretty good book, but by turns interesting and annoying. Carr sketches the history of the rise of the big electric utilities in the early 20th century, then predicts that "utility computing" will similarly displace inhouse corporate IT facilities in the early 21st century, just as companies stopped generating their own electricity way back then.
The historical review is nicely done -- I learned, for instance, that General Electric was once Edison General Electric -- and Carr is on to the reason why companies adopt new technology: it's cheaper, more convenient and/or the competition has already adopted it. The annoyances start when he starts prognosticating. As Yogi Berra once observed, "the trouble with predicting the future is that it is very hard." It looks like Carr read everyone else's Internet/computing predictions, mixed them up a bit, and regurgitated.
OK, I'm being a bit hard on him. Where Carr knows something about an industry -- publishing, for instance -- he has some sharp observations on the migration of newspapers online, and the consequent unbundling of the paper package you buy at the corner for a dollar. For other stuff, he's so scattershot, you'd be you'd be better off to read some of the original critics and prophets -- Carr has nothing new to add, and ends up confusing the reader (and probably himself).
So: read the history, the economics, and the publishing stuff, and skim or skip the rest -- that's my advice.
Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
Book Review: The Big Switch
Summary: 4 Stars
I very much enjoyed this read. The author takes you through the history of the switch to an electrical grid (which we all are now totally dependant on) and compares that switch to what is going on with the Internet. A few interesting points include:
The current set of changes in the Internet involve small users being able to use tremendous amounts of memory on servers of large Internet companies like Google and Yahoo - for free.
The business model for becoming a massive Internet site is to get users who use your site to supply the information or value, like Wikipedia is doing.
It gets a bit scarey when he talks about how little privacy we really have on the Internet and the idea that some are trying to develope the Internet into artificial intelligence. If technology and computers are your thing, you will enjoy this book.