Q&A: Author Nicholas Carr on the Terrifying Future of Computing
Nicholas Carr is high tech's Captain Buzzkill — the go-to guy for bad news. A former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, he tossed a grenade under big-budget corporate computing with his 2004 polemic Does IT Matter?
Context & Ripple Effects
Nicholas Carr has been making the same argument louder since his 2004 polemic 'Does IT Matter?' — written while he was executive editor of Harvard Business Review — first told big-budget corporate computing that its spending buys no strategic edge. The Wired Q&A extends that thesis from budgets to people: per Network World's syndicated framing of the same interview, 'the IT department is dead.'
The timing matters because the alternative he points to was already being built: the Web 2.0 build-out Om Malik examined in his 2005 look at community versus commerce ran on someone else's servers, not the corporate data center Carr says is obsolete.
First-order effects
- CIOs and in-house IT staff are the named casualties: the interview argues the department that runs corporate computing is a candidate for elimination, not just downsizing.
- Carr himself gains a second act as high tech's designated skeptic — Wired bills him as the go-to source for bad news, which converts a business-press polemicist into a mainstream technology voice.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise hardware and software vendors face buyers who have been told their internal function is dispensable, pushing them to reposition products as utility-style services rather than capital purchases.
- Whoever operates the shared computing utility inherits the demand that used to flow to corporate IT procurement — a shift already visible in the outsourced infrastructure underpinning Web 2.0 services.
Third-order effects
- If computing consolidates into a small set of utility-scale operators, bargaining power migrates from thousands of corporate IT departments to a handful of providers — a structural concentration of the industry's economics.
- The pattern also sets up a recurring cultural fight over what centralized computing does to its users, with Carr positioned as the standing critic whenever the next wave arrives.
The trend: Corporate computing is shifting from owned data centers and in-house IT departments toward rented utility services, with Carr as its most prominent critic.