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 enlarge | Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $14.56
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Rating:  29 reviews
Sales Rank: 2791
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 276
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1
ISBN: 0393062287
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4834
EAN: 9780393062281
Publication Date: January 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 One of my favorites April 27, 2008
J. Martens
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book will go down as one of my favorites. I loved all the history of electricity that Carr writes about and how well he ties it into the modern computer age. He doesn't stop there and goes on to tie our current computer age into the future of computers.
Very well written and interesting from start to finish.
Any collection strong in computer trends needs this. March 5, 2008
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
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
Great food for thought... May 10, 2008
Kenneth Gonzalez
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Some of the other reviewers here have some criticisms of Carr's examples and I think that they are valid, if taken purely from a mechanical perspective. I think that the best part of the book is that Carr goes to great lengths to show why the analogies and comparisons are worthwhile. Whether or not you agree with his specific conclusions about utility computing (or of a specific player/technology), he is squarely pointing towards a future that is upon us now. Anyone that has an interest in how technology is likely to unfold over the next years would be well advised to read this book and consider his perspective.
 Very Worthwhile, One Major Flaw March 3, 2008
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
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
The End of the IT Department? January 13, 2008
Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA)
20 out of 23 found this review helpful
Nicholas Carr tells us that a great transformation taking place: The Big Switch, as it were. Businesses are switching from inhouse IT departments to network services or, as the he calls it, utility computing. This switch is similar to what happened with electricity a hundred years ago. At that time companies produced their own electricity by operating their own generators. This, however, was enormously inefficient and expensive. Eventually companies saw the wisdom of using a giant centralized grid operated by companies like Edison and Westinghouse.
Utility computing has been talked about for years; people like Larry Ellison have been promoting it for a long time. Some companies are slowly making the transition, but most still buy their own computing equipment, their own software, and still hire legions of IT personnel. Carr argues that this will all change once everyone moves to the computing grid. Computing, he claims, is now a commodity like electricity was at the beginning of the last century. It is no longer cost effective for companies to try and differentiate themselves by doing all their IT services inhouse when everything is available on the Internet.
The social consequences of this transition will be huge. Some IT companies will prosper and others will suffer or become irrelevant. Companies like Microsoft and Intel will be losers since they will be selling less hardware and software. Others like Google, the archetypal utility computing company, will prosper. Google operates the largest data centers in the world and offers a wide variety of software apps that private companies no longer need to develop on their own. Carr believes that the Microsoft's client/server modal is on the way out.
As companies move to the grid their IT departments will be drastically downsized. Carr goes as far as foreseeing "just one person sitting at a PC and issuing simple commands over the Internet to a distant utility." He writes that even Internet companies such as Craigslist, YouTube, and Flickr operate with minimal staff since they are making maximum use of the grid.
The fate of content producers such as journalists, photographers, reviewers, and editors is even worse. (Read also The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Unabridged) by Andrew Keen.) Professionals are being replaced by hobbyists, who, by the way, don't make any money. The professional will have to find other work to support was is now their hobby.
Carr's vision of the future may be excessively bleak. No doubt the losers of the utility age will find their new niche just as electrical workers did in the last century. This book will be helpful to the IT professionals who are trying to reposition themselves as IT departments decline.
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