I came across Nick Carr’s offer to get an advance copy of his forthcoming book The Big Switch on his blog. The premise of the book is a very interesting topic for me, I work on enterprise software and there are big changes coming in this space. To get an advance copy I had to be amongst the first 150 folks to send an email to the publisher. The book showed up last week in the mail. Very innovative way to get some buzz going, although my blog is probably at the tail end of the long tail. My part of the bargain is to blog about the book, so here goes.

The book makes for an engaging read when drawing parallels between the electric utility business at the turn of the nineteenth century and the IT industry today. The book also does well as a survey of the different approaches being used by companies to supply software and hardware as a service. Nick builds up to the notion of a World Wide Computer and it all flows nicely. The author then tries to tackle some very complex and thorny topics and they prove to be overwhelming. Topics like the economic and social impact the World Wide Computer will require a lot more pages and a much deeper analysis than the book provides.

The book tries to maintain a neutral tone and succeeds when describing the past and the present. Nick’s predictions on the other hand, tend to be of the doom and gloom sort. Nick does not believe in the when a job is lost in one place, two more get created elsewhere theory. He believes that the World Wide Computer will cause far bigger economic upheavals and jobs will stay lost, millions of them. Disturbing stuff, that I don’t really want to believe in (maybe I should). The IT industry is going to expect and extract enormous efficiencies from hardware and software, folks are going lose jobs in large numbers as these efficiencies kick in.

The best example the author has is this site here. Apparently, this entire site is operated by a single guy who rakes in 10,000 dollars a day at times. The entire revenue stream is based on ads. Examples like YouTube and Craigslist are also cited, very successful sites based on very few employees. These companies highlight the highly skewed distribution of wealth that will occur. 60 employees of YouTube make 1.6 billion, all the suckers who put their content on there get a thank you note.

If these examples suggest a macro-trend then all this is indeed bad news. Good old large corporations sound benevolent by comparison. But, I am not convinced that this is a macro trend. I had read
another book on economics the week before last. This book had a whole chapter
on economic incentives and how they govern our behavior. The suckers who put their
content on YouTube don’t have much to lose right now, at some point they lose the incentive to participate and things are going to work out differently. These community based valuations seem suspicious anyway. EBay seems to be finding out that buying communities like Skype is not a viable business model in the long run.

People will not participate if there are no economic incentives. Open source programmers write code for free because there is someone paying them, maybe not for the open source code, but for something they do for an employer. Take away that job and there will be no free open source code anymore.

In the end I wish the author had not diversified as much and focused on a few topics in greater depth. Should you buy the book ? Sure, buy it. It will get you started on thinking about the future of IT.

Recently read a book called Stumbling on Happiness. It is a well written book and contains descriptions of a number of interesting experiments that offer glimpses into how the brain works. To me, the title might have as well been Stumbling on Simplicity, I think we generally equate simplicity with happiness and complexity with “I need to get paid a lot of money to do this”. The assumption being that the money will make us happier.

Simplicity has to be one of the most subjective concepts. The book talks about how we are constantly making predictions of the future based
on sketchy notions of the past and a more accurate notion of the present. I think we find things to be simple, when these predictions are correct. When these predictions go wrong, we have to make an extra effort to understand something and we deem that complex.

So, the next time I want to re-use a piece of code, unless the person who wrote that code shared some of my experiences and “thinks like me”, I will find their code incomprehensible and complex. On the other hand, if my predictions about their code turn out to be accurate, the code receives a big two thumbs up and the stamp of simplicity. This is the problem with most software frameworks, my definitions of simple and complex are my own.

Unless I am a part of a statistically significant population, my definitions are worthless to others. So, here is the trick then – build a site like eHarmony,
call it frameworkharmony. Join in, fill in your software psychological profile
and we will find a matching framework. We guarantee that you will find
it simple and will code happily ever after.