I've got my first "Vision Thing" post! After all, nothing better deserves the category than a book originally subtitled "Our New Digital Destiny" (later changed to a more buzzword-oriented "Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google"), right?

Nick Carr's new book, "The Big Switch," addresses the rise of utility-model computing in its march toward dominance in our daily computing experience. I'm a little stretched for space here; you can read my full review at my blog Status.

To put it together in a paragraph, Nick is back on provocative territory again, but he's just as well grounded as he was with "Does IT Matter?"; the book which first drew the ire and fire of half the computer industry. Carr envisions a future increasingly shaped by life on the Internet, with massive, centrally concentrated clusters of computing power providing most of the mechanisms we will use for our day to day computing needs. The future is now in some respects; Nick draws on examples from the world of Web 2.0 and ties them in well with an understandable, well-written comparison to the evolution of electric power from a user-generated and consumed specialty item to a broadly available, centrally managed and provisioned utility model. He also predicts some dire economic consequences from this movement; unlike with the Industrial Revolution, he doesn't see utility computing providing sufficient numbers of new jobs to make up for those which it will displace.

While I accept the general thrust of Nick's argument, I put down the book feeling like I had missed something, or that the whole story hadn't quite been told. The trend seems clear, and if it's controversial, it's probably for the same reasons that "Does IT Matter?" was controversial... not because it was wrong, but because people didn't want to hear it. Unlike that previous work, I didn't feel that some of his conclusions were well-supported or that he addressed some of the internal contradictions this time around. If you're interested in the most significant tred in computing today, then "The Big Switch" is certainly worth a read. I can't help but feel that it is just the opening paragraph in what should be a larger conversation on the subject, however.