The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr (Jaideep Venkatesan)

Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch is the latest entry in the "Cloud Computing" genre, though Carr forecasted the phenomena in his earlier book "Does IT Matter?". Carr compares the Internet, which he tries to rename the "World Wide Computer", will do for computing what the electric power grid for electricity - move companies from strategic customization of computing resources to a complete outsourcing for access to computing technologies. It is an intriguing metaphor for something that has been written about extensively elsewhere - the use of outsourced centralized servers for hardware and software applications, most notably offered by Amazon and Google.

Car admits that there are important differences between electricity in the early twentieth century and computing technologies in the twenty-first. Unlike electric power, computing technologies are much more protean, and the programmability inherent in computing technologies ultimately differentiates it from power sources. But even if that is the case, the metaphor Carr explores provides a useful starting point for forecasting what will happen to the industry.

On Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet (Jaideep Venkatesan)

Jonathan Zittrain's book, The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It, is an extraordinary examination of computing and internet technologies in the "Web 2.0" world. Zittrain's thesis, which I will probably not do justice here, is that the personal computing and internet are generative technologies, which provide incredible opportunities for innovation but ultimately leave users vulnerable to security and privacy risks, including viruses, spam, and other versions of malware. There is a risk that popular fear of these risks will put pressure on regulatory authorities to lockdown the internet and computing industry and prevent both security risk and innovation, or the market will respond with "tethered appliances" that accomplsh the same things.

Zittrain counsels a set of community responses to these risks, providng generative answers to generative problems. He makes a provactive comparison to Madisonian government, in which the Constitutions' separation of powers and federalism doctrines were a response to moderate, but not choke, democracy in the late 19th Century, providing a republican solution to a republican theory.

See http://futureoftheinternet.org/