Book Review:The Big Switch-Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

March 31, 2008

I like to share my reading list with people and the latest book that has caught my attention is the book that made the Wall Street Journal’s business bestseller list in the first week of March, just behind one of my all-time favourites – Good To Great.The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google is worth your time. I am only halfway through the book but it has been a great read so far and really made me think about the future of the Internet, SaaS (software as a service) and cloud computing.

This is a must-read for anyone involved in the Internet in any way at all. It might not have actionable items for most people, but it doesn’t set out to provide those. The book seeks to give a reasonable projection of how the use of the Internet will evolve, in the context of how electricity distributions and use evolved.

Once I started reading, I immediately recognized that the book was talking about things like Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service - provides storage and bandwidth, being used by some Facebook apps), Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud – provides computing capacity instead of having to buy new machines) and ventures like Salesforce.com that provide software over the web and charges a monthly fee instead of buying software, installing on your computer and having to upgrade when new changes arrive.

Of course the book talks about these exact examples and more so I was even more hooked. You might not agree with everything, but it is a great hypothesis for where we are going next and provides some examples from today. Check out the synopsis written by the publisher:His last book shook up the high-tech industry. Now, Nicholas Carr is back with The Big Switch, a sweeping and often disturbing look at how a new computer revolution is reshaping business, society and culture.

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.

The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.

Buy a copy, you won’t be disappointed, trust me.

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