Fighting talk

The IT industry did greet Does IT Matter? with a hailstorm of abuse. Bill Gates called the book "the dumbest thing I've ever read" Not to be outdone, Steve Ballmer called it "hogwash".

Another Microsoft executive, Charles Fitzgerald, threatened to write a couple of articles for the Harvard Business Review -- one entitled "Brains Don't Matter" ("Everyone has a brain, so why bother to think?"), the other called "Food Doesn't Matter" ("for the restaurant business").

During a question-and-answer session at a Gartner conference, Intel's perennially prickly Craig Barrett refused to discuss Carr's ideas, suggesting instead that he and his interviewer "talk about something more consequential".

The mob reacted with less courtesy. Anonymous users at one IT news site called Carr a "charlatan" and the "Janet Jackson of authors". Summing up, National Public Radio in the US suggested that the industry's preferred solution was to burn Carr at the stake -- "metaphorically at least".

Since these outbursts, Nick Carr and the IT industry have largely kept their distance from one another. A few vendors, he says, have actually "enquired" about taking him on as a consultant. But nothing has ever come of it.

"To be honest," Carr tells me, "I've found that between speaking and writing I can make a living. So by avoiding consulting I think I can maintain my independence a little more clearly."

Silver linings

Despite this, I get the feeling that Carr would like to be known for something other than his ability to start a fight in a room full of IT salespeople. Conveniently, the development of cloud computing gives him something mildly positive to say. Like much of his writing, Carr's discussion of The Cloud proceeds by analogy. The starting point is familiar enough. It's been kicking around since the mid-1990s, when Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, liked to tell audiences that his mother would never have to use Windows again.

Instead, said McNealy, she would use "a new model of computing ... a Java client, because you just click -- down comes your application, it's verified, it's safe, it runs".

By 1999, Larry Ellison was telling anyone who would listen that corporate IT would "begin to look like the electricity utility, the telephone utility, or the water utility systems".

So how much has been achieved in a decade? Given the hype, not a lot. Part of the explanation, suggests Carr counter-intuitively, has been bandwidth scarcity, and if you accept that argument, you might also accept that The Cloud is destined to become a permanent feature of life this time around.

Carr certainly thinks so. Oddly, how-ever, The Big Switch soft-pedals the question of what will happen to the finances of Oracle, SAP, IBM and Hewlett-Packard when they venture into The Cloud.

This is curious. To understand why, you only need to look at the revenue growth and share price performance of utility companies. In the absence of oil shocks, both are typically as flat as the Fens. Utilities are companies for widows and orphans, safe investments characterized by thin margins, big cashflows and fat dividends. They tend to be highly regulated too -- something that presumably delights the denizens of Armonk (headquarters of IBM of course).