The Big Switch

Carr argues that computing is following the path electricity took: from something each organisation generated for itself to a utility supplied over a network by specialised providers at a scale no individual user could match.

The historical parallel occupies the first half. Factories in the nineteenth century generated their own power with waterwheels and steam engines, and each had a plant and staff to run it. Once alternating current made long-distance transmission viable, central generation became so much cheaper that private generation disappeared within about two decades. Carr argues the same economics apply to computing: data centres achieve utilisation, purchasing and operational efficiencies that an individual company's servers cannot, and the internet supplies the transmission.

His prediction, made in 2008, was correct. Corporate data centres have largely been replaced by cloud providers, and the internal information technology function's role has changed as he described.

The second half concerns consequences and is more speculative. Carr argues that utility computing concentrates enormous power in a small number of providers, that the economics produce fewer jobs than the industries they replace, that the personalisation the technology enables fragments shared culture and public discourse, and that the aggregate of individual choices produces outcomes nobody chose.

The utility argument was well made and correct. The social chapters are essayistic and their predictions are mixed. The book's value now is as a demonstration that a structural economic argument about technology can be correct while its social consequences remain unclear.