'The Big Switch': Welcome to the Worldwide Computer

A quiet revolution in computing is taking place as you read this.
It'll change the way we work, socialize and function as people, communities and nations. It will have an impact on how we make war and peace. Some say it's the biggest thing since electricity became a utility -- yet most of us won't see it coming.
According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, the revolution that's coming is based on the idea that the Internet, a network of computers, is becoming a gigantic computer itself. Not only will users be able to write programs to run on this "World Wide Computer," as Carr calls it, but sooner or later, this system will gain a level of artificial intelligence .

Economies of Scale
Carr takes us back 100 years, to the time when Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull built a network of wires and power-generation facilities, and transformed electricity from a specialized novelty into a broadly available utility.
Carr draws parallels between then and now. At one point, big manufacturers produced all their electricity on site, just as many corporations have on-site servers and information-technology departments today. However, electricity production, as do IT and computing, benefits from economies of scale. Like electricity, IT and computing usage follows similar peak load and capacity patterns. Unused capacity -- think of your home PC while you're at work or the corporate server when the business day is over -- can be minimized by analyzing and matching the usage patterns of many types of customers.
Like electricity, IT can function as a utility, Carr says. Corporations, instead of building, maintaining and supplying internal servers and applications, can buy these services over the Internet from companies specializing in IT -- at a lower cost than running an in-house system. As an example, Carr points to Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) , a company started by Marc Benioff, a veteran Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) employee. The company provides customer relationship management (CRM) services over the Internet to corporations that would otherwise buy and staff their own in-house CRM systems. The company's sales in 2007 topped US$500 million.
Salesforce.com isn't alone. "Employease offers a service for managing personnel. LeanLogistics has one for scheduling transportation. Oco provides a 'business intelligence' service, allowing executives to analyze corporate information and create planning reports. Digital Insight supplies a range of services to banks."
Further Into the Future
Carr spends the first half of Big Switch explaining the corporate and individual switch from computing as a box sitting in front of the user to being a utility like electricity. In the second half, Carr veers away from talk of business and utilities and steers toward territory that science-fiction fans might find appealing.
Carr warns the reader that just as electricity was heralded as a cure-all for modern society that didn't fulfill utopian promises, we should be careful making similar proclamations for utility computing.
Carr is neither a utopian nor a Luddite. In one chapter, he writes about "the unbounded possibilities that tomorrow's computing opens up for making our lives better." In another, he reveals the chilling Information Operation Roadmap put out by the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2003. He finds it "disconcerting to read military planners calmly laying out a doomsday scenario in which American forces act to 'disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors and weapons systems dependent on electromagnetic spectrum.' "
Carr is excited about where this is all going, although his optimism is tinged with restraint. With technological advances, he says, come setbacks, not to mention mismatches between the power of new tools and the knowledge of how best to use them.
Those looking to The Big Switch for advice on how to harness the power of the computing revolution will be disappointed. Carr's book is a glance at where computing has come from and where it could go in the future, with a warning about what the future can bring.