{"id":267,"date":"2008-02-02T02:44:49","date_gmt":"2008-02-01T23:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/blog\/?p=267"},"modified":"2008-02-05T22:27:46","modified_gmt":"2008-02-05T19:27:46","slug":"why-commodity-software-is-a-socialist-fad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/?p=267","title":{"rendered":"Why commodity computing is a socialist fad"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some two days ago I started to read Nick Carr’s<\/a> (an American IT-guru of “IT doesn’t matter” -fame) article on FT<\/a>. It’s excerpt from his new book Big Switch. I guess you don’t have to buy the book to get his argument. It was actually already present in IT doesn’t matter: the commodification of computing and especially software.<\/p>\n

The argument is not new and I have never understood it. The first time I saw it was maybe in early 1991 when I received the first subscribed copy of Tietokone-magazine, the local computer magazine aimed at PC enthusiasts and professionals. On the cover there was a bunch of monitors and keyboards but the central units were notoriously missing. The claim was that this is the future of computing. WTF?! These fucking dumb “clients”?! I remember I almost canceled my order right away. I just knew<\/i> that this claim was so wrong. And even if it would have been to the right direction I definitely hoped that this bad omen would never materialize.<\/p>\n

But now we are at it again, just in a bit different form. I did have problems with Carr before but now that I read his latest work I understood he’s just another John Dvorak. Carr’s problem are analogies that sound nice but do not work in practice at all. His most prominent analogy is to compare software with electricity. Yeah, hundred years ago or so electricity became commodity. Some companies disappeared. And – Carr says – the same is now happening to software. Microsoft is disappearing. Software is becoming commodity like Gmail and Gaps, or whatever they are called. Right?<\/p>\n

I say Carr mixes up the Internet with software applications without understanding their basic differences. Internet is commodity, correct. It’s like public roads. But most software applications are not commodity. My software applications are like my car, they are stand-alone engines fed by my over-powered personal computer. I don’t use Google’s apps, and I won’t. I know this is costing the society resources but so are all those millions private cars not running at the moment (or run by just the driver). I’m not taking collective traffic because it simply does not deliver. End of argument. Socialism failed, and so did Nick Carr.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some two days ago I started to read Nick Carr’s (an American IT-guru of “IT doesn’t matter” -fame) article on FT. It’s excerpt from his new book Big Switch. I guess you don’t have to buy the book to get his argument. It was actually already present in IT doesn’t matter: the commodification of computing … Continue reading “Why commodity computing is a socialist fad”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.valimaki.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}