I recently got to a book that’s been in my queue since it came out: Nick Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. Carr’s the writer who became infamous in corporate IT circles with an article in the Harvard Business Review called “IT Doesn’t Matter.” The article suggested that information technology was becoming less a competitive advantage and more a commodity to any business–which is correct. Nonetheless, his analysis spawned a furious wave of rebuttals from indignant CIOs and their supporters, as if he’d instead suggested that companies should do away with IT entirely. My thought at the time: thou dost protest too much.
Carr’s latest work likens the broad changes currently underway in computing to the evolution of electricity, particularly in the scope of change it brought to business and society. I couldn’t agree more. At Yankee Group we’re dedicated to examining the emergence of ubiquitous connectivity, which we believe is the heart of the computing changes that Carr examines. The parallels that we see to the standardization of electricity are many and profound. And that’s what made me so eager to read the book: knowing he was right about corporate IT and already agreeing with his latest logic.
But while I nodded my head intently as he set out the basis of the electrical/computing analogy (which is most of Part 1), I got bored in Part 2 and, in the end, was left wanting more. Maybe he’s saving some for the next book, but I thought he dropped his use of the electrical revolution as analogy, and went on to cover ground that has been previously well-trod without bringing much new to the discussion. Chapters on the Net’s impact on existing mass media, information security, and privacy felt dated, disjointed, and not well-connected to his framing analogy.
One dimension where I felt let down by The Big Switch is also where I feel the technology sector itself has yet to pick up on the impact of ubiquitous connectivity: the change it will bring to objects around us. The electrical revolution, among other things, was responsible for an explosion of new devices in our lives as workers and consumers, coupling electricity with important items to create things more useful to us than their forebears. Tools in the home and the workplace were transformed in value by the integration of their own heat source or motive power.
Where are the coffee percolators, the vacuum cleaners, the mixers and blenders, of the connectivity revolution — devices that incorporate persistent wireless connectivity to both augment and regularly update their usefulness to me?
The Anywhere revolution will be marked, in part, by a fantastic wave of connected devices that will do as much to change our lives as consumers as those household appliances did to change the life of the middle-class homemaker. Will it be Sony, Philips, Samsung, Kenmore, LG, or Sunbeam that leads the way? So far, I’d have to say no. A new device maker, imbued with creativity inspired by persistent connectivity, will lead the way. And another book, whether by Carr or someone else, will have to point this out.