the big switch: what's Nicholas Carr talking about??

Reading The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr. When I question what Carr is talking about, I mean to say this: He describes a centralized "information utility" that this space and other services (Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, Hotmail...) are powered by (22). But how far will this centralization go? Won't the advantages of decentralized computing (privacy, control over data archiving) still lead institutions to use hybrid solutions that harness centralized computing when it works and local applications when they provide the best solution?

Based upon the Prologue, this quote from chapter 3 is central to Carr's argument: "most of the software and almost all of the hardware that companies use today are essentially the same as the hardware and software their competitors use...the same goes for the employees who staff IT departments" (57). As one example, the National Science Foundation's DataNet solicitation stands as a counterargument to these assertions. In this case, the NSF is looking for partners to develop, over a decade, a sustainable, revenue-neutral solution for the preservation of digital data sets. The awarded institutions will undoubtedly be the "haves" of computing infrastructure and human talent. The "have-nots" will become their customers.

I agree, at a high level, with Carr's argument but I have some issues with the details. Carr asserts that Microsoft was founded "to write software for the newly invented PC"; in fact, the company started by developing software for microcomputers (54). While Microsoft's OS and productivity applications are threatened by software as a service, Microsoft was and is strongly positioned to support hybrid solutions involving both locally-loaded and online services.

The Big Switch is quite relevant to the industry that I work in, library automation. As one example, OCLC recently issued a press release in which it described its work in moving library systems to the network level. In analyzing this release and work, Vanderbilt's Marshall Breeding's described what he sees as the likely results of this development; his analysis is very similar to Carr's for the information industry as a whole:

OCLC’s vision involves shifting increasing portions of activity managed library-by-library through locally or consortially implemented automation systems to the network level, subsumed under the global WorldCat infrastructure...in this era where cloud computing gains an increasing portion of business automation, OCLC sees WorldCat Local as a platform that offers libraries an opportunity to achieve similar efficiency, leveraging the power of the cooperative.

Breeding cites reduced personnel demands as a motivator for moving to the envisioned model; Carr deals at length with the impact of utility computing upon staffing in chapter 7, "From the Many to the Few." While I agree with Carr's general argument, I have trouble picturing relying upon "social production" for a large subset of the "nonroutine cognitive tasks" cited by the author, particularly those tasks that are ongoing and improved by a company or institution through experience (136-7).

Time to move on to the next work. This title is recommended as a basic grounding in cloud computing and as a means of learning more about specific commercial firms/ventures that have succeeded using this model.