If you wonder whether the publishing industry is riding a current of uncertain destiny, it is. This uncertainty resides in the forms in which ownership and access to what we know as intellectual property will be re-shaped by the next stage of utility computing and the many ways, as a consequence, in which intellectual property will be accessed and freely shared.
"What happened to the generation of power a century ago is now happening to the processing of information . . . .Computing is turning into a utility, and once again the economic equations that determine the way we work and live are being rewritten."
Anyone in the book business who reads this and how the author backs it up in Nicholas Carr's new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (Norton, 2008. 978-0-393-06228-1) will come away with a profoundly useful understanding of the forces at work in our world of intellectual property . . . or will decide this is just another blue sky thesis with doom at the end of its rainbow.
I am in the former camp. Maybe I missed the obvious until now, but I was so blown away by the insights in the book and their explanation of why businesses from Google and Amazon to Salesforce.com, Wikipedia and You Tube are forever reshaping our forms of social, political and economic organization that I read it in a 24 hour cycle spanning two days – which for me, the chronic slow word at a time reader, was a tour de force.
Think of free applications, utility computing, world wide computer, universal computing grid, virtualization – all terms that describe the inexorable transfer to the world wide web of computing power from packaged and distributed software on networked work stations and scores of thousands of corporate servers all performing the same functions on replicated software for their fire-walled in-house enterprise.
What makes it inexorable are the economic imperatives. And keep in mind that in the digital and internet world e-books are analagous to distributed software products.
To think of an analogy: tracking the explosion of technologies in the digital age has been for me like being out on the high seas propelled by currents of unknown origin and destination whose secrets were known only by others, and then, with this book, being handed a chart and compass that enables me to steer my course. It doesn’t guarantee that I will choose the right course, but I at least have some idea of what I am dealing with.
While reading the book I came to realize that letting go of my traditional concept of possession will open me up to a higher order of ownership of my time and my human potential. But of more immediate value, I have begun to understand what is happening in our book business – the incredible opportunities that lie ahead as well as the unsettling threats to our well-ordered notions of intellectual property and of what it means to publish.
On a global scale Carr takes us through a description of the dozens of "server farms" that Google has set up around the world. In each of these facilities are scores of thousands of simple hard drive server computers stacked in frames, grouped in clusters that in turn are managed in each center in a way that links them to what in effect is a single global computer that can perform the millions of simultaneous tasks in nanoseconds that yield up the search results we see on our screens. If one ore more of these servers blows out, there are 500,000 others to take its place.
The leap beyond the obvious is that these farms (as with many smaller but substantial computing clusters in other enterprise computing centers) are designed to handle whatever the conceivable peak load demand might be at one time or another – which means that most of the time there is excess capacity lying idle.
That excess capacity is what makes it possible for Google, Amazon and other computational giants to offer their storage and computing capacity as an outsource more economically than any single company can manage on their own. (Google Apps, Amazon Web Services).
At the other end of scale, smaller and more focused operations can use virtualization to "rent" capacity to many independent computer systems.
Now you know why Microsoft, also building its own server farms, is going after Yahoo. Carr quotes an October, 2005 memo from Bill Gates, "The next sea change is upon us. . . .The broad and rich foundations of the internet will unleash a 'services wave' of applications and experiences available instantly . . .services designed to scale to tens or hundreds of millions [of users] will dramatically change the nature and cost of services deliverable to enterprises or small businesses."
Major corporations have begun to outsource their utility computing by renting computer capacity and computer system services distributed to thousands of terminals that themselves do not store programs or hard drive data.
Carr also takes through the many ways any consumer can build complete audio, graphic and video files and productions using swift and sophisticated high end tools on line at no cost (i.e. no more off the shelf purchase of software). His archetype consumer moves from a cameraphone video to upload on You Tube, accessed on his own blogsite (from Wordpress), sharing photos on Flickr and retouching them on Phixr. Using Last.fm that monitors his music playlist his top 10 are automatically tabulated and shared with his blog site friends in a widget provided by another service. Finally, MyBlogLog enables him to track his visitors, and through an account with Feedburner set up an RSS syndication for blog visitors who click the subscribe button they provide.
This growing universe of free software applications and services, the social networks and communities of interest that can move into action almost instantly, are forms of empowerment that new generations are taking for granted – they threaten the old formats of print and analog media to the extent that the latter become increasingly irrelevant to the way people actually communicate on a day to day basis.
Carr's comparison of the evolution of the computing industry with the growth of the electric power industry since the days of Thomas Alva Edison and Samuel Insull at the turn of the last century is carefully measured so as not to mix apples and oranges – but holds up in their economic fundamentals. Each is what economists call a General Purpose Technology (GPT) – "best thought of not as discrete tools but as platforms on which many different tools or applications can be constructed." If their supply can be consolidated, "they offer huge economies of scale."
In the early days of electric power at the turn of the last century, Edison's model called for local generating plants serving small neighborhoods, and individual plants powering each manufacturing facility. Insull, once mentored by Edison, realized that with the replacement of DC current (efficiently transmittable only for relatively short distances) with AC current, economies of scale could be realized in large central power plans that served homes and industries in large regions.
It took a number of years to persuade businesses to give up control of their own power generation – to get out of the energy business and concentrate on their manufacturing business. Ultimately this began to happen at an accelerated pace as industry saw that the central services were in fact more reliable, relieved them of the need to have specialized technicians on their payrolls, and that hooking up was a competitive necessity.
Behind the headlining of Microsoft's reach for Yahoo and Google's relentlessly expanding digitization of the universe of knowledge lies this inexorable transformation of information processing. from the distributed redundancy of the same software utilities on billions of computers, to networked connections to leased, protected and backed up data storage and computer power residing in bits and pieces in stacks of computer drives housed in server farms around the world.
There are other aspects of global computing and the tracking and serving of consumer interests that have disturbing implications that Carr discusses in some depth that I will leave for another occasion. As a general proposition it has to do with driving people further and further into their social, economic and political safety zones through preference tabulation and reinforcement. The huge amount of diversity served by the internet and wireless communication is not necessarily bringing everyone together unless deliberate efforts are made to re-create the concept of the "commons" on a global scale.
I don’t believe that what we know as books in the printed form will disappear in lifetimes to come– but how they will be made, and what other electronic forms will complement them are in some ways out of our hands. Disruptive technologies and business models are on the way.
Carr closes with an engaging observation about how despite the universal use of electric energy to light our homes, streets and businesses – the revolutionary candle wick that once brought illumination from the unwieldy cave wall torch to the table top remains in use nonetheless – as a safety and emergency device, and as a way for us to scale back into the elegant and relaxed associations it provides.
If we are lucky as well as smart, one or another of us will catch the wave. Creativity – known as content – will not disappear – but the packaging and serving of content will more quickly fall into the channels of "free" and the utility formats of search, repurposing and sharing.
What kind of business models – what ways of making a living will emerge?
Meantime, I wonder from time to time about what will happen when the Big Switch loses power, or gets turned off. It is a great science fiction thought.
Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large