One of my favorite parts of the role that Nicholas Carr is playing as an observer of modern computing culture, and a fomenter of useful change, is not so much what he has to say - and I think he says a lot of very insightful, very useful things - but what he triggers other people to say, think, and perhaps do.

At the very least, Carr certainly makes the conversation in our industry far more interesting.

The buzz around The Big Switch started a few months back, but really kicked into high gear just before Christmas. The book was formally released today, so I look forward to reading it soon.

Bernard Golden has a good review up at cio.com. From his review:

Carr argues, computing is moving from company-based data centers to large utility computing infrastructures run by the likes of infrastructure providers (e.g., Amazon and its EC2 offering) and centralized services run by application providers (e.g., Google Applications) ...

... IT organizations will be superseded by end user organizations taking computing into their own hands, aided by the availability of centralized utilities and applications ...

... The second half of the book goes in a different direction, though. Having described the advantages of centralized computing, Carr begins to methodically outline its drawbacks ...

From a recent Q&A with Wired (part of the book buzz) comes this quote:

Wired: When does the big switch from the desktop to the data cloud happen?
Carr: Most people are already there. Young people in particular spend way more time using so-called cloud apps — MySpace, Flickr, Gmail — than running old-fashioned programs on their hard drives. What's amazing is that this shift from private to public software has happened without us even noticing it.

All of these are pretty good points - not only are they hard to argue with, why would you want to?

The Sound of Inevitability

There is no doubt that clouds have been cutting a wide swath through much of the computing that people really do for the past ten years or so. Quietly until recently, but now a simple, widely-accepted fact of life.

The Whole Story?

Yet ... this is definitely not the whole story for the enterprise.

For those applications that are clearly present in the cloud - salesforce.com being the most obvious current-day enterprise example - there's no doubt that end user organizations, with or without the cooperation and assistance of their IT organization, will simply roll their own.

Beyond these core services, however, most apps will still be built by somebody and run somewhere. Sure, they may be a standard app that's bought and deployed in a cloud, but they may just as easily (and more likely in many cases) be composite applications built out of the best components that you can live with, wherever they're found. In the cloud, in the data center, at somebody's house for that matter.

Anyplace that can meet the scale and data security needed for that particular app.

The point is that the stuff that runs an enterprise has two main functions - it encapsulates what that enterprise knows how to do (hopefully better than their competitors), and it enables a big chunk of that company's competitive advantage ... and this is true no matter who builds it or where it runs.

That is why it is so important to begin building and deploying apps that are truly indifferent to the number of components and locations of the physical infrastructure, that are very happy with lots of commodity computers, that can just as easily make use of cloud apps and components and proprietary apps, and in any of these combinations will simply work as intended.

If we can do this while making it much simpler to build the app - and we can (and have) - then all the better!