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With a reported 900 million active members, Facebook is, by far, the largest digital-sharecropping operation that the internet has yet produced. About one out of every eight people on the planet sharecrops for Facebook today – and their collective labor is expected to put a billion dollars of cash into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pocket when the company goes public in a few weeks. In a 2006 post, I expl
August 30, 2010 The big news this week is the launch of a National Science Foundation-funded study aimed at "developing the NeuroPhone system, the first Brain-Mobile phone Interface (BMI) that enables neural signals from consumer-level wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headsets worn by people as they go about their everyday lives to be interfaced to mobile phones and combined with existing sen
August 23, 2010 Wired magazine cover story, August 2005: "We Are the Web" Wired magazine cover story, September 2010: "The Web Is Dead" Unavoidable conclusion: "We Are Dead" Posted by nick at August 23, 2010 03:16 PM Advertisement: Now available: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Order now from Amazon. Comments
As someone who has enjoyed and learned a lot from Steven Pinker’s books about language and cognition, I was disappointed to see the Harvard psychologist write, in Friday’s New York Times, a cursory op-ed column about people’s very real concerns over the Internet’s influence on their minds and their intellectual lives. Pinker seems to dismiss out of hand the evidence indicating that our intensifyin
“You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal.” -Bob Dylan Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a knack for making statements that are at once sweeping and silly, but he outdoes himself with this one: You have one identity … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. This is, at the obvious level, a clever and cynical ploy to recast the debate about Facebook’s o
The iPad’s iBooks application may or may not become our e-reader of choice – even uber-fanboy David Pogue seems a mite skeptical this morning – but the model of book reading (and hence book writing) the iPad promotes seems fated, in time, to become the dominant one. The book itself, in this model, becomes an app, a multihypermediated experience to click through rather than a simple sequence of pag
Over the last few days, I’ve been involved in an email discussion on “The Crowd,” which will be excerpted on PBS’s Digital Nation site. One thing that has long bothered me about discussions of online crowds is that they tend to yoke lots of different sorts of groups together under a single rubric. Important differences end up being glossed over. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to think through
In an analysis released today, and covered by Forbes and the New York Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company provides a useful, if flawed, counterweight to some of the more excited hype about cloud computing. While granting that “clouds are very cost-effective” for small and medium-sized companies, McKinsey argues that a large company would spend considerably more today if it were to shut d
Three truths: 1. Google is a middleman made of software. It’s a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That’s Google. 2. The middleman acts in the middleman’s interest. 3. The broader the span of the middleman’s control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman’s po
Yesterday was a remarkable day for the small, slightly obsessed band of Google data-center watchers of which I am one. Around each of the company’s sprawling server farms is a high metal fence patrolled by a particularly devoted squad of rent-a-cops, who may or may not be cyborgian in nature. Ordinary humans seeking a peek at the farms have been required to stand at the fence and gaze at the seren
February 11, 2009 On August 12, 1981, 28 long years ago, IBM introduced its personal computer, the IBM PC. Hidden inside was an operating system called MS-DOS which the computing giant had licensed from a pipsqueak company named Microsoft. IBM didn't realize it at the time, but the deal, which allowed Microsoft to maintain its ownership of the operating system and to license it to other companies,
There has been much interesting speculation about the future of the newspaper business in recent weeks. There was Michael Hirschorn’s pre-obituary for the print edition of the New York Times in The Atlantic. He foresees the Times shrinking into “a bigger, better, and less partisan version of the Huffington Post.” There was the Times’s David Carr running the old micropayments idea up the flagpole.
January 05, 2009 The paperback edition of The Big Switch is making its way into bookstores and, for early adopters, is available now from Amazon.com and BN.com. The paperback includes a new section, "The Cloud 20," in which I profile 20 leading cloud computing businesses. The companies, as I write in the introduction to the section, "together illustrate the impressive breadth of the cloud computin
November 25, 2008 Microsoft has been touting its "software plus services" strategy for some time, but if you want see some of the most creative thinking about how to meld cloud services with traditional PC software you'd do well to look not at Microsoft but at Mathematica. Wolfram Research, which makes Mathemetica, a heavy-duty and widely used program for computation and modeling, announced last w
November 07, 2008 Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there's good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the ca
Are we missing the point about cloud computing? That question has been rattling around in my mind for the last few days, as the chatter about the role of the cloud in business IT has intensified. The discussion to date has largely had a retrospective cast, focusing on the costs and benefits of shifting existing IT functions and operations from in-house data centers into the cloud. How can the clou
This week’s pissing match – I mean, spirited conversation – between Tim O’Reilly and me regarding the influence of the network effect on online businesses may have at times seemed like a full-of-sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing academic to-and-fro. (Next topic: How many avatars can dance on the head of a pin?) But, beyond the semantics, I think the discussion has substantial practical importance.
October 27, 2008 Tim O'Reilly, in a comment on my earlier post about how he overstates the importance of the network effect, writes: "... you failed to address my main point, namely that cloud computing is likely to be a low-margin business, with the high margin applications found elsewhere." Let me try to correct that oversight. O'Reilly is here using "cloud computing" in the narrow sense of offe
October 27, 2008 Having spent billions constructing a data center network over the last couple of years, Microsoft this morning launched, in limited "preview" form, Windows Azure, its platform for cloud computing. The announcement was made by Microsoft's top software executive, Ray Ozzie, in a speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Microsoft will use the Azure p
October 26, 2008 Technology publisher and Web 2.0 impresario Tim O'Reilly wrote a thought-provoking post today about the dynamics of the nascent cloud computing business. He makes some important and valid points, but his analysis is also flawed, and the flaws of his argument are as revealing as its strengths. O'Reilly begins by taking issue with Hugh MacLeod's contention that, thanks to "power law
“Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.” The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. T
September 02, 2008 Google's release today of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet "cloud." I distinctly remember when, back in 1988, Apple Computer added MultiFinder to its Macintosh operating system, allowing my beloved Mac Plus to run more than one application at a ti
June 03, 2008 Bill Gates, in his farewell address at Microsoft's TechEd developer conference today, sketched out Microsoft's expansive plan for cloud computing. The company, he said, will have "many millions" of servers in a network of data centers. Those centers will ultimately provide as utility services everything done today by traditional Microsoft software installed on local servers: We're ta
June 03, 2008 We already know that the famously cute story of eBay's origin - founder Pierre Omidyar launched the site to help his fiancee trade the PEZ dispensers she collected - was a lie cooked up by a PR operative. We also know that the company's vaunted "reputation system" - the foundation of what has long been perceived as a radically new kind of self-organizing and self-policing commercial
There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it
« Silicon Death Valley | Main | Understanding Amazon Web Services » Miasma computing May 27, 2008 The metaphor of "the cloud" is a seductive one, but it's also dangerous. It not only suggests that our new utility-computing system is detached from the physical (and political) realities of our planet, but it also lends to that system an empyrean glow. The metaphor sustains and extends the old ideali
May 19, 2008 Microsoft expects corporate customers to accelerate their shift to the cloud computing model over the next five years, bringing changes in the company's financial model, says Chris Capossela, the senior vice president who manages Microsoft's Office business. In one of the most forthright statements of Microsoft's view of the shift from in-house to utility-run software, Capossela said,
May 02, 2008 As Microsoft and Yahoo continue with their interminable modern-dress staging of Hamlet - it's longer than Branagh's version! - the transformation of the software business goes on. We have new players with new strategies, or at least interesting new takes on old strategies. One of the cornerstones of Microsoft's competitive strategy over the years has been to redefine competitors' prod
April 29, 2008 A new study, to be released today by McKinsey & Company, reveals in some of the clearest terms yet the sea change that is under way in business software. The consulting firm surveyed more than 850 corporate software buyers, from firms of all sizes, and found that software-as-a-service is rapidly "becoming mainstream," with three-quarters of software buyers saying they are "favorably
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