The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
"Future Shock for the Web-apps era.... Compulsively readable―for nontechies, too."―Fast Company Building on the success of his industry-shaking Does IT Matter? Nicholas Carr returns with The Big Switch, a sweeping look at how a new computer revolution is reshaping business, society, and culture. Just as companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the newly built electric grid some hundred years ago, today it's computing that's turning into a utility. The effects of this...
Search in google:
"Future Shock for the Web-apps era.... Compulsively readable—for nontechies, too."—Fast Company Publishers Weekly While it may seem that we're in the midst of an unprecedented technological transition, Carr (Does IT Matter?) posits that the direction of the digital revolution has a strong historical corollary: electrification. Carr argues that computing, no longer personal, is going the way of a power utility. Manufacturers used to provide their own power (i.e., windmills and waterwheels) until they plugged into the electric grid a hundred years ago. According to Carr, we're in the midst of a similar transition in computing, moving from our own private hard drives to the computer as access portal. Soon all companies and individuals will outsource their computing systems, from programming to data storage, to companies with big hard drives in out-of-the-way places. Carr's analysis of the recent past is clear and insightful as he examines common computing tools that are embedded in the Internet instead of stored on a hard drive, including Google and YouTube. The social and economic consequences of this transition into the utility age fall somewhere between uncertain and grim, Carr argues. Wealth will be further consolidated into the hands of a few, and specific industries, publishing in particular, will perish at the hands of "crowdsourcing" and the "unbundling of content." However, Carr eschews an entirely dystopian vision for the future, hypothesizing without prognosticating. Perhaps lucky for us, he leaves a great number of questions unanswered. (Jan.)Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Prologue: A Doorway in Boston 1Part 1 One Machine1 Burden's Wheel 92 The Inventor and His Clerk 253 Digital Millwork 454 Goodbye, Mr. Gates 635 The White City 85Part 2 Living in the Cloud6 World Wide Computer 1077 From the Many to the Few 1278 The Great Unbundling 1499 Fighting the Net 16910 A Spider's Web 18511 iGod 211Epilogue: Flame and Filament 231Appendix The Cloud 20 235Notes 245Acknowledgments 271Index 273
