The Big Switch
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The Big Switch Also by Nicholas Carr Does IT Matter? The Big Switch Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google Nicholas Carr W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York London Excerpt from ―All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace‖ from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster by Richard Brautigan. Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2008 by Nicholas Carr All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 Production manager: Anna Oler Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carr, Nicholas G., 1959– The big switch: rewiring the world, from Edison to Google/Nicholas Carr.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-393-06786-6 1. Computers and civilization. 2. Information technology—Social aspects. 3. Technological innovations. 4. Internet. I. Title. QA76.9.C66C38 2008 303.48'34—dc22 2007038084 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT One lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase. —Henry Adams Contents Prologue: A Doorway in Boston Part 1: One Machine 1. Burden‟s Wheel 2. The Inventor and His Clerk 3. Digital Millwork 4. Goodbye, Mr. Gates 5. The White City Part 2: Living in the Cloud 6. World Wide Computer 7. From the Many to the Few 8. The Great Unbundling 9. Fighting the Net 10. A Spider‟s Web 11. iGod Epilogue: Flame and Filament Notes Acknowledgments PROLOGUE A Doorway in Boston IT WAS A blustery November day, cold but bright, and I was lost. The directions I‘d printed off the Internet weren‘t doing me any good. The road map that had looked so simple on my computer screen had turned into a ball of real-world confusion—thanks to Boston‘s cow-path roads and its plague of twisted street signs. As the digits of my dashboard clock clicked past the scheduled time for my lunch meeting, I decided I‘d have better luck on foot. I pulled into an open parking space across from the high green walls of Fenway Park, got out of the car, and asked a passerby for directions. He pointed me to a nearby street and, at last able to follow the twists and turns of my MapQuest printout, I soon arrived at the right place: a hulking gray building at the end of a litter-strewn side street. At least I thought it was the right place. I was looking for a company named VeriCenter, but there was no name on the building—just a beat-up little sign with a street number hanging from a post above a heavy steel door. I double-checked the address: it was definitely the right number. So I pushed the door open and walked into the world‘s most unwelcoming entryway: no furniture, no window, no company directory, no nothing. Just a black phone without a keypad on the wall beside another heavy steel door. I lifted the phone and a man‘s voice came on the line. I gave him my name and the name of the person I‘d come to meet, and he buzzed me through—into a second entryway, nearly as barren as the first. The man, a security guard, sat behind a metal desk. He put my driver‘s license through a tiny scanner, printed a blurry image of my face onto a visitor‘s pass, then had me sit in a chair beside an elevator. Someone would be down in a minute, he said. By this time, I was starting to wish I had stuck to my guns and turned down the meeting. A guy from VeriCenter‘s PR firm had been sending me emails for some time, and I‘d been diligently forwarding them into the electronic trash bin. But when he managed to get hold of me by phone, I gave in and agreed to a meeting. Here I was, then perched on an uncomfortable chair in what appeared to be a dilapidated factory on the Friday before Thanksgiving in 2004. To be honest, I found it pretty odd that the VeriCenter folks had been so intent on meeting me in the first place. I didn‘t know much about the company—it had been founded toward the end of the great dotcom boom, the publicist had told me, and it was headquartered in Houston—but I did know that it was in the information technology business, and most people in the IT field kept their distance from me. I was the ―IT Doesn‘t Matter‖ guy. That was the title of an article I‘d written a year and a half earlier—in May 2003—for the Harvard Business Review. I had argued that despite the many grand claims made about the power of corporate computer systems, they weren‘t actually all that important to a company‘s success. They were necessary—you couldn‘t operate without them—but most systems had become so commonplace that they no longer provided one company with an edge over its competitors. Whenever somebody did something new with a computer, everyone else soon followed suit. Strategically speaking, information technology had become inert. It was just another cost of doing business. One reporter called the article ―the rhetorical equivalent of a 50-megaton smart bomb.‖ For months afterward, the high and the mighty of the technology world went out of their way to attack my heretical idea. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft‘s chief executive, declared it ―hogwash.‖ Carly Fiorina, then the head of Hewlett–Packard, said I was ―dead wrong.‖ Speaking at a big tech conference, Intel‘s CEO, Craig Barrett, boomed at the audience, ―IT matters a whole lot!‖ The controversy even found its way into the popular press. Newsweek dubbed me ―the technology world‘s Public Enemy No. 1.‖ When the Harvard Business School Press published an expanded version of the article as a book, the industry went through a whole new round of hysterics. So, as you might imagine, I wasn‘t exactly used to being invited to lunch by computer companies. THE ELEVATOR OPENED and out stepped Jennifer Lozier, VeriCenter‘s smartly dressed marketing director. She escorted me up to a conference room and introduced me to a handful of her colleagues, including one of VeriCenter‘s founders, Mike Sullivan. A born entrepreneur, Sullivan could hardly contain his enthusiasm. He was holding a copy of my book, a couple of dozen Post-It notes sprouting from its pages. ―When I read this,‖ he said, ―I knew I had to meet you. We‘re doing exactly what you write about.‖ He tapped the cover of the book. ―This is our business.‖ I was puzzled. Why would an IT company embrace the idea that IT doesn‘t matter? Sullivan explained that he used to work as a general manager for Microsoft but that in 1999 he left to help launch VeriCenter because he wanted to pioneer a whole new way of supplying information technology to companies. He was convinced that, instead of buying and running their own computers and software, businesses in the future would just plug into the Internet and get all the data processing they needed, served up by outside utilities for a simple monthly fee. In my book, I‘d compared information technology to electricity. VeriCenter, said Sullivan, was taking the next logical step: to actually supply it like electricity, through a socket in the wall. After a quick lunch and the obligatory PowerPoint presentation about the company, Sullivan said he wanted to give me a tour of ―the data center.‖ He led me back downstairs, through a hallway, to yet another door—this one constructed of steel mesh. The security guard diligently checked our badges before unlocking the door with a keycard chained to his belt. He escorted us inside. Passing through that door was like entering a new world. The building may have looked like an old factory from the outside, but hidden inside was something altogether different—something not from the industrial past but the digital future. Stretching out before me, illuminated by the steady, sterile light of a thousand fluorescent bulbs, was a room the size of a city block, and it was filled with big computers. They stood in long rows inside locked cages, bearing the familiar logos of companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and HP. There didn‘t seem to be any other people in the room, just the machines, their fans humming and their red and green LEDs pulsing placidly as billions of bits of data streamed through their microprocessors. Overhead, big vents sucked up the heat from all the chips while other vents pumped in cool, filtered air. Sullivan led me through the computers to a pair of side rooms that each held a huge Caterpillar diesel generator capable of pumping out two megawatts of electricity. With the fuel stored on site, he explained, the generators could keep the center operating for more than three days in the event of a power failure. He showed me another room that was packed from floor to ceiling with industrialsized batteries, a second backup for briefer outages. We then walked to a corner of the facility where a fat pipe came through the wall. Holding a bundle of fiber-optic cables, it was the Internet connection that linked this roomful of computers to the dozens of businesses that used the data center to run their software and store their data.