"BS" Detector

Carr told CIO that the inspiration for writing his original article and subsequently the book was "reading through a lot of vendors' marketing material [where] a common theme repeated over and over again is 'IT is the core of strategic advantage in the digital age' and every system that's sold is presented as a potential source of strategic advantage". He says these sorts of comments roused his "in-built bullshit meter".

In his book, he refers to the "veneration of IT", which he described to CIO as "a sense of renewal and transformation, touted as not only making our business better but the world better. The big technological developments tend to attract over-exaggerated hopes.

"A lot of arguments that say there's going to be another wave are based on faith. A lot of people, particularly technologists - they said it a lot in the 90s but they keep saying it now - say that IT is the biggest technological revolution of all time. And I think if you look at electricity, I'm sorry, but electricity changed people's lives and changed how businesses operated in a much more fundamental way than computerization."

Which scenario is likely to be right - the global depression or Ballmer's IT candy store?

Probably (hopefully?) neither.

As Carr said in his original article when referring to his comparison of the 19th century depression with the environment that exists today: "We can only hope the analogy ends there . . . It's a very different world today, of course, and it would be dangerous to assume that history will repeat itself. But with companies struggling to boost profits and the entire world economy flirting with deflation, it would also be dangerous to assume it can't."

More recently he told CIO: "As business processes become more based on the IT underpinning and as the Internet allows you to accomplish them anywhere, almost by definition, I don't think you can be sanguine that everything is going to work out.

"The American economy has been extremely resilient and to underestimate its resilience is probably a good way to be wrong, so I'm trying not to be a doomsayer. I'm just saying you can get ill effects as well as very good ones. But society tends to in general focus on the good effects and tries to ignore the dooms."

Judging by the reaction to Carr's article and now his book, he can rest assured that society is definitely not ignoring the dooms. At least, not all of them.