From a dripping faucet to a fire hose
So where does all of this lead?
"Just like the electrical socket brought a wave of change to the way we live and work," Carr said a "similar effect will come out of the utility model of computing."
Admitting that future changes of the magnitude he was describing are inherently difficult to predict, Carr nevertheless indulged the audience and peered into the tea leaves.
With their datacenters sent up to the cloud, corporations will rethink the interface of enterprise computing systems and move toward a more customizable workflow, he suggested. Then, also, the old talk of firewalls and isolated systems will become outmoded, for "the essential quality of utility, or cloud, computing is that it's built on the assumption that applications and data want to be shared."
"The World Wide Web is turning into the World Wide Computer, a shared processing machine that all of us can tap into for our own purposes," Carr proclaimed.
For much of Carr's address, he talked of the effect cloud computing and virtualization would have on innovation as something like a dripping faucet turning into a fire hose, but he left the audience with a few sober warnings about where the revolution was leading.
One byproduct is what he referred to "with a little exaggeration" as the "workerless company." It is the same concern the trade unionists warn of when they discuss offshoring, only instead of American jobs going to India or China, utility computing will send human jobs to the cloud.
Whereas the electrification of industry led to a boom in industry that created a huge and prosperous middle class, utility computing threatens to reverse that demographic transformation by hollowing out the mid-section of the technology economy, creating a "digital elite."
By way of example, Carr mentioned British Telecom, the telephone company, which had about the same number of subscribers as VoIP provider Skype did at the time of its acquisition by eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) two and a half years ago. The difference, Carr said, was that British Telecom had about 100,000 employees, and Skype had 200.
Then consider a site like Craigslist, which for years has been steadily chipping away at the classified business of the newspaper industry, with a workforce of about 20.
Then there is the story of Marcus Frind, the one-man force behind PlentyofFish.com, the world's fifth most popular dating site, and one of the most popular 100 sites in any category. Through a remarkably savvy use of Google's AdWords program, Frind built and maintains the site by himself, raking in between $5 million and $10 million annually from ad revenue.
"The cost of creating and distributing a product are basically zero, because it's all done with digits," Carr said.
Finally, talking directly to the assembly of search engine marketers who turned out for his keynote, Carr turned to privacy. He recalled the AOL debacle of 2006, when the search histories of more than 600,000 people were posted on the Web, and it didn't take more than a couple days' detective work by The New York Times to match the anonymized search queries to real people.
"People's entire lives are laid out in their search terms," Carr said, philosophically musing that computing technology is at once dazzling for the innovation and services it delivers, and supremely unsettling for how much of people's lives are given over to machines.
"Computer systems have always been characterized by their liberating nature on the one hand, and their controlling nature on the other hand," he said. "I'll leave you with a question: Which side are you on?"
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