Book Review: The Big Switch

Next month, Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch will be published in which he compares the centralization of electricity production to the current “cloud computing” phenomenon. Carr is one of my favorite voices in the technology field and he was kind enough to send me an advance copy of his book.

In a way which few do well, Carr uses history to understand the ramifications of important trends in today’s world. As more and more information technology is moved from one’s individual PC or firm to large server farms run by companies like Google, Amazon or Salesforce, Carr believes we will see profound changes in media, privacy, and more: even our biology may be affected.

This change to software as a service is, Carr explains, largely analogous to the big switch of one hundred years ago when electricity became a centralized commodity. During much of the Industrial Revolution large factories had to make the energy necessary for running the tools of production. To this end, factories were built near large rivers or other sources of energy.

However, the work of Thomas Edison and his protege Samuel Insull made electricity production an industry unto itself which would come to benefit from economies of scale. Commonwealth Edison and other energy companies made it possible for factories to be located anywhere and new inventions to proliferate in the homes of middle-class America. To Carr, this was a monumental occurrence which is on par with today’s shift toward Internet services.

The trend he analyzes is still developing rapidly with Amazon’s Web Services and Google’s products evolving weekly. Yet, Carr does a good job regarding the ramifications of this trend. He discusses privacy in a Web 2.0 world, media’s unbundling, threats to this progress and even provides a provocative look at where this may take us.

It is rare to come across a book which is as approachable, lucid and important as The Big Switch and I highly recommend ordering it.