Indie 2.0

[UPDATE 30 Mar 2008: see my additional post on this book]

Tim O’Reilly reports that a tech book his company publishes, “The Big Switch”, has perhaps just hit an inflection point–quadrupling sales (to approx. 4,300 copies/week) in the past week.

The book is by Nicolas Carr and is about how cloud computing is the future of computing–just as surely as electricity became a commodity on a grid. (’Cloud computing’ is the idea that you don’t need computers in your office or home–software and data will live in huge data centers. You’ll access it via a web browser. Moreover, companies with web applications don’t even need standard data centers to host their web servers. They’ll spread their applications across thousands of servers–via something called virtualization–to optimize utilization of the servers. Computing then becomes a ‘utility’ like electricity.)

In 2004 Carr wrote another interesting book, about the coming extinction of the corporate IT department.

What accounts for the sudden interest in this particular book?, however, Tim O’Reilly asks. Commenters on his blog point to a number of factors:

• Good review in USA Today
• Google exec touting it
• It’s been mentioned in articles about Microsoft’s new data center initiative (old dog attempting new trick)
• It’s a really good book, with other good blurbs/reviews

OK. That was enough for me to order my copy from Amazon. This phenomenon is going to “rock the server rooms” (sung to the tune of Joe Strummer’s ditty) worldwide. Some of the reviews on Amazon ding it as nothing more than an extended magazine article which would have been insightful 2-3 years ago, but not today (despite those negative reviews, the book still gets four stars). I’ll spring for US$17.13 and judge for myself.

[Yeah, not good, I'm up in the middle of the night blogging--too much chocolate before bed. And a new MacBook Pro arrived yesterday, waiting to be set up and played with, dancing like sugar plums in my head--but which I won't be able to get to until Sunday. But once I'm set up with FC installed, I'll let you know my experience of playing and editing with Red R3D files.]