Contents. Career Nicholas Carr originally came to prominence with the 2003 article 'IT Doesn't Matter' and the 2004 book Does IT Matter?
Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. In these widely discussed works, he argued that the strategic importance of in business has diminished as has become more commonplace, standardized and cheaper.
In May 2003, Nicholas Carr, an editor at Harvard Business Review, wrote an article titled “IT Doesn’t Matter,” which stirred significant debate in the business community.
His ideas roiled the information technology industry, spurring heated outcries from executives of, and other leading technology companies, although the ideas got mixed responses from other commentators. In 2005, Carr published the controversial article 'The End of Corporate Computing' in the, in which he argued that in the future companies will purchase information technology as a utility service from outside suppliers. Carr's second book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published in January 2008.
It examines the economic and social consequences of the rise of Internet-based ' comparing the consequences to those that occurred with the rise of in the early 20th century. In the summer of 2008, published Carr's article ' as the cover story of its annual Ideas issue. Highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition, the article has been read and debated widely in both the media and the. Carr's main argument is that the Internet may have detrimental effects on cognition that diminish the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Carr's 2010 book, develops this argument further. Discussing various examples ranging from 's typewriter to drivers', Carr shows how newly introduced technologies change the way people think, act and live. The book focuses on the detrimental influence of the Internet—although it does recognize its beneficial aspects—by investigating how has contributed to the fragmentation of knowledge.
When we search the Web, for instance, the context of information can be easily ignored. 'We don't see the trees,' Carr writes.
'We see twigs and leaves.' One of Carr's major points is that the change caused by the Internet involves the physical restructuring of the human brain, which he explains using the neuroscientific notion of '.'
In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize nominee, the book appeared on the nonfiction bestseller list and has been translated into 17 languages in addition to English. In January 2008 Carr became a member of the Editorial Board of Advisors of. Earlier in his career, Carr served as executive editor of the. He was educated at and.
In 2014, Carr published his fourth book, ', which presents a critical examination of the role of computer in contemporary life. Spanning historical, technical, economic, and philosophical viewpoints, the book has been widely acclaimed by reviewers, with the terming it 'essential.' In 2016, Carr published ', a collection of blog posts, essays, and reviews from 2005 to 2016. The book provides a critique of modern American techno-utopianism, which magazine said 'punches a hole in Silicon Valley cultural hubris.'
Blog Through his blog 'Rough Type,' Carr has been a critic of and in particular the populist claims made for online. In his 2005 blog essay titled 'The Amorality of Web 2.0,' he criticized the quality of volunteer information projects such as and the and argued that they may have a net negative effect on society by displacing more expensive professional alternatives. In a response to Carr's criticism, Wikipedia co-founder admitted that the Wikipedia articles quoted by Carr 'are, quite frankly, a horrific embarrassment' and solicited recommendations for improving Wikipedia's quality. In May 2007, Carr argued that the dominance of Wikipedia pages in many search results represents a dangerous consolidation of Internet traffic and authority, which may be leading to the creation of what he called 'information plantations'. Carr coined the term 'wikicrats' (a pejorative description of ) in August 2007, as part of a more general critique of what he sees as Wikipedia's tendency to develop ever more elaborate and complex systems of rules and bureaucratic rank or caste over time. Nicholas Carr speaking at the 12th Annual Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference at Resort in on May 28, 2008. He holds a B.A.
From Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American literature and language, from Books. Digital Enterprise: How to Reshape Your Business for a Connected World (2001). Does IT Matter? (2004). The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008, W. Norton). (2010, W.
Norton). The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (2014, W. Norton). Utopia Is Creepy: and Other Provocations (2016, W.
Norton) See also. Notes. December 8, 2003. June 1, 2003, at the. 2004. August 25, 2003.
June 2003. Carr, Nicholas G. (April 15, 2005). Retrieved December 26, 2013. November 19, 2007, at the.
December 2007. Carr, Nicholas (July 2008). Retrieved 2008-10-06.
November 18, 2013, at Jared Nielsen. Lehrer, Jonah New York Times, June 3, 2010. Schuessler, Jennifer. The New York Times. January 28, 2014.
March 3, 2008, at the. – Britannica Blog, January 25, 2008.
December 6, 2010, at the. The New York Times. November 9, 2014. February 1, 2016. Foroohar, Rana.
October 2005. October 6, 2005. May 17, 2007. August 23, 2007. External links Wikiquote has quotations related to: Wikimedia Commons has media related to. on. Carr, Nicholas (July 2008).
Retrieved 2008-07-09. at the (archived April 21, 2006). May 1, 2004. August 21, 2004. January 23, 2008 ITworld.
After pouring millions of dollars into in-house data centers, companies may soon find that it’s time to start shutting them down. IT is shifting from being an asset companies own to a service they purchase. Advertisement Something happened in the first years of the 20th century that would have seemed unthinkable just a few decades earlier: Manufacturers began to shut down and dismantle their water wheels, steam engines and electric generators. Since the beginning of the Industrial Age, power generation had been a seemingly intrinsic part of doing business, and mills and factories had had no choice but to maintain private power plants to run their machinery. As the new century dawned, however, an alternative started to emerge. Dozens of fledgling electricity producers began to erect central generating stations and use a network of wires to distribute their power to distant customers.
Manufacturers no longer had to run their own dynamos; they could simply buy the electricity they needed, as needed, from the new suppliers. Power generation was being transformed from a corporate function to a utility. Almost exactly a century later, history is repeating itself.
The most important commercial development of the last 50 years — information technology — is undergoing a similar transformation. It, too, is beginning an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own in the form of computers, software and myriad related components to being a service that they purchase from utility providers. Few in the business world have contemplated the full magnitude of this change or its far-reaching consequences. To date, popular discussions of utility computing have rarely progressed beyond a recitation of IT vendors’ marketing slogans, laden with opaque terms like “autonomic systems,” “server virtualization” and “service-oriented architecture.” Rather than illuminate the future, such gobbledygook has only obscured it. The prevailing rhetoric is, moreover, too conservative. It assumes that the existing model of IT supply and use will endure, as will the corporate data center that lies at its core.
But that view is perilously shortsighted. The traditional model’s economic foundation already is crumbling and is unlikely to survive in the long run. As the earlier transformation of electricity supply suggests, IT’s shift from a fragmented capital asset to a centralized utility service will be momentous. It will overturn strategic and operating assumptions, alter industrial economics, upset markets and pose daunting challenges to every user and vendor. References 1. There are notable exceptions.
See, for example, M.A. Rappa, “The Utility Business Model and the Future of Computing Services,” IBM Systems Journal 43, no.
1 (2004): 32–42; and L. Siegele, “At Your Service,” Economist, May 8, 2003 (a survey of the IT industry).
The term was introduced in a 1992 paper by T.F. Bresnahan and M. Trajtenberg, later published as “General Purpose Technologies: ‘Engines of Growth’?” Journal of Econometrics 65, no. 1 (1995): 83–108. Helpman, ed., “General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998). Friedlander, “Power and Light: Electricity in the U.S.
Energy Infrastructure, 1870–1940” (Reston, Virginia: Corporation for National Research Initiatives, 1996), 51. Nye, “Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), 236. Hughes, “Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930” (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 106–139; and R.B. DuBoff, “Electric Power in American Manufacturing, 1889–1958” (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 42–45.
For more on Insull’s career and accomplishments, see Hughes, “Networks,” 201–226; and H. Evans, “They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators” (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 318–333. “The Systems and Operating Practice of the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago,” Electrical World and Engineer 51 (1908): 1023, as quoted in Hughes, “Networks,” 223.
DuBoff, “Electric Power,” 40. For a discussion of the homogenization of information technology in business, see N.G. Carr, “Does IT Matter?
Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage” (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Andrzejak, M. Arlitt and J. Rolia, “Bounding the Resource Savings of Utility Computing Models,” working paper HPL-2002-339, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California, Nov.
Berstis, “Fundamentals of Grid Computing,” IBM Redbooks Paper, Austin, Texas, Nov. 11, 2002; www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3613.pdf. Hildebrand, “Why Squirrels Manage Storage Better Than You Do,” Darwin, April 2002, www.darwinmag.com/read/040102/squirrels.html. Gomolski, “Gartner 2003 IT Spending and Staffing Survey Results” (Gartner Research, Stamford, Connecticut, Oct.
Effective and standardized metering systems will be as crucial to the formation of large-scale IT utilities as they were to electric utilities, and work in this area is progressing rapidly. See, for example, V.
Albaugh and H. Madduri, “The Utility Metering Service of the Universal Management Infrastructure,” IBM Systems Journal 43, no.
1 (2004): 179–189. Although the shift to utility supply will reduce the need for in-house IT staff, companies will likely maintain groups of professionals with both technical and business skills to ensure that the purchased IT services are properly configured to support in-house processes and vice versa. Google and Amazon.com already provide utility IT services. Companies draw on Google’s data centers and software to distribute advertisements over the Internet and add search functions to their corporate Web sites. Amazon, in addition to running its own online store, rents its sophisticated retailing platform to other merchants such as Target, JCPenney and Borders.
Christensen, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997). It’s telling that today’s vendors of utility IT services such as hosted applications and remote data centers have been among the most aggressive adopters of open-source software and other commodity components. Nye, “Electrifying America,” 170–174.
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