ONE year ago, Nicholas Carr was just another 40-something junior editor at the Harvard Business Review—interested in information technology ( IT), sometimes contributing as a writer, but otherwise as unknown to the outside world as such editors tend to be. Then, last May, he published a simple, jargon-free, eight-page article in the HBR, called “ IT doesn't matter”. “I figured I'd ruffle a few feathers for a week or two,” he recalls. What happened instead remains puzzling to this day, not least to Mr Carr himself. The entire trillion-dollar IT industry, it seemed, took offence and started to attack Mr Carr's argument. Chief information officers ( CIOs), the people in charge of computer systems at large companies, heard the noise and told their secretaries to dig out the article and put it on their desks. Analysts chimed in.

Rebuttals were rebutted. Suddenly, Mr Carr was the hottest number for anyone organising a techie conference. Within months, he was expanding the original article into a book, “Does IT matter?”, which is coming off the presses this month. Already its detractors and supporters are lining up for round two of the controversy. Part of Mr Carr's trick, it seems, is simply choosing great titles. “ IT doesn't matter” is viscerally threatening to people such as Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, a maker of fancy and expensive computers. Like other tech bosses, Mr McNealy basked in gee-whiz celebrity status during the dotcom bubble but has been spending the past three years defending Sun's relevance to suddenly sceptical customers and investors.

A confident showman, he challenged Mr Carr to a debate, on stage and on webcast. It was a debacle. “Sun does matter,” Mr McNealy seemed to be arguing, or even “I still matter.” Even Mr Carr's critics in the audience wondered whether Mr McNealy had actually bothered to read the article. And this is the other explanation for Mr Carr's great impact. His argument is simple, powerful and yet also subtle. He is not, in fact, denying that IT has the potential to transform entire societies and economies.

Aug 11, 2003. Download Free Cast In Moonlight Michelle Sagara Pdf Software. IT Doesn't Matter. An article by Nicholas G. Carr published in the Harvard Business Review in. May 2003 available online. Carr proposes that IT has ceased to be the strategic advantage creator that it. For an example, a pharmaceutical company can hold a patent on a compound that is the. Carr, then editor at large of HBR and now a consultant and author, was that there is noth- ing all that special about informa- tion technology (IT). He declared that information technology is inevitably going the way of the rail- roads, the telegraph, and electricity, which all became, in economic terms, just ordinary.

Drivers Cam Gvc Pc 840. On the contrary, his argument is based on the assumption that IT resembles the steam engine, the railway, the electricity grid, the telegraph, the telephone, the highway system and other technologies that proved revolutionary in the past. For commerce as a whole, Mr Carr is insistent, IT matters very much indeed. But this often has highly ironic implications for individual companies, thinks Mr Carr. Electricity, for instance, became revolutionary for society only when it ceased to be a proprietary technology, owned or used by one or two factories here and there, and instead became an infrastructure—ubiquitous, and shared by all. Only in the early days, and only for the few firms that found proprietary uses for it, was electricity a source of strategic—ie, more or less lasting—advantage. Once it became available to all firms, however, it became a commodity, a factor of production just like office supplies or raw materials, a cost to be managed rather than an edge over rivals, a risk (during black-outs) rather than an opportunity.

Computer hardware and software, Mr Carr argues, have been following the same progression from proprietary technology to infrastructure. In the past, American Airlines, for example, gained a strategic advantage for a decade or two after it rolled out a proprietary computerised reservation system in 1962, called Sabre. In time, however, its rivals replicated the system, or even leap-frogged to better ones. Today, the edge that a computer system can give a firm is fleeting at best. IT, in other words, has now joined history's other revolutionary technologies by becoming an infrastructure, not a differentiator. In that sense, and from the point of view of individual firms, “ IT no longer matters.” And what's IT all about?

Surely though, Mr Carr's critics counter, IT is different from electricity or steam engines. Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Version 18 Free Download here. Even if hardware tends to become a commodity over time, software seems, like music or poetry, to have infinite potential for innovation and malleability. True, it may have, answers Mr Carr, but what matters is not whether a nifty programmer can still come up with new and cool code, but how quickly any such programme can be replicated by rival companies.