The Big Switch

En route to my mailbox from Amazon.com (via my mother as a sort-of late Christmas present… thanks Mom!) is The Big Switch by Nick Carr.  A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Carr is now widely regarded as an authoritative voice on information technology.  He frequently comments on the impact of IT on culture and business, and this new book explores the history, the present, and the future of that impact.  I look forward to reading it and reporting back in.

This morning, Carr published an excerpt from the first chapter of The Big Switch on his blog.  While you should definitely check out the whole excerpt, here is — as Fake Steve would put it — the “money quote”:

In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed with the rise of electric utilities in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society – for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think – promise to be equally profound. If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth century society – that made us who we are – the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century.

For another interesting post by Carr (especially for you dual Apple- and Googlephiles), read this.