Nicholas Carr has foisted an existentialist debate on the mighty information-technology industry

ONE year ago, Nicholas Carr was just another 40-something junior editor at the Harvard Business Review—interested in information technology (IT), sometimes contributing as a writer, but otherwise as unknown to the outside world as such editors tend to be. Then, last May, he published a simple, jargon-free, eight-page article in the HBR, called “IT doesn't matter”. “I figured I'd ruffle a few feathers for a week or two,” he recalls.

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What happened instead remains puzzling to this day, not least to Mr Carr himself. The entire trillion-dollar IT industry, it seemed, took offence and started to attack Mr Carr's argument. Chief information officers (CIO Psx games on psp. s), the people in charge of computer systems at large companies, heard the noise and told their secretaries to dig out the article and put it on their desks. Analysts chimed in. Rebuttals were rebutted. Suddenly, Mr Carr was the hottest number for anyone organising a techie conference. Within months, he was expanding the original article into a book, “Does IT matter?”, which is coming off the presses this month. Already its detractors and supporters are lining up for round two of the controversy.

Part of Mr Carr's trick, it seems, is simply choosing great titles. “IT doesn't matter” is viscerally threatening to people such as Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, a maker of fancy and expensive computers. Like other tech bosses, Mr McNealy basked in gee-whiz celebrity status during the dotcom bubble but has been spending the past three years defending Sun's relevance to suddenly sceptical customers and investors. A confident showman, he challenged Mr Carr to a debate, on stage and on webcast. It was a debacle. “Sun does matter,” Mr McNealy seemed to be arguing, or even “I still matter.” Even Mr Carr's critics in the audience wondered whether Mr McNealy had actually bothered to read the article.

And this is the other explanation for Mr Carr's great impact. His argument is simple, powerful and yet also subtle. He is not, in fact, denying that IT has the potential to transform entire societies and economies. On the contrary, his argument is based on the assumption that IT resembles the steam engine, the railway, the electricity grid, the telegraph, the telephone, the highway system and other technologies that proved revolutionary in the past. For commerce as a whole, Mr Carr is insistent, IT matters very much indeed.

But this often has highly ironic implications for individual companies, thinks Mr Carr. Electricity, for instance, became revolutionary for society only when it ceased to be a proprietary technology, owned or used by one or two factories here and there, and instead became an infrastructure—ubiquitous, and shared by all. Only in the early days, and only for the few firms that found proprietary uses for it, was electricity a source of strategic—ie, more or less lasting—advantage. Once it became available to all firms, however, it became a commodity, a factor of production just like office supplies or raw materials, a cost to be managed rather than an edge over rivals, a risk (during black-outs) rather than an opportunity.

Computer hardware and software, Mr Carr argues, have been following the same progression from proprietary technology to infrastructure. In the past, American Airlines, for example, gained a strategic advantage for a decade or two after it rolled out a proprietary computerised reservation system in 1962, called Sabre. In time, however, its rivals replicated the system, or even leap-frogged to better ones. Today, the edge that a computer system can give a firm is fleeting at best. IT, in other words, has now joined history's other revolutionary technologies by becoming an infrastructure, not a differentiator. In that sense, and from the point of view of individual firms, “IT no longer matters.”

And what's IT all about?

Surely though, Mr Carr's critics counter, IT is different from electricity or steam engines. Even if hardware tends to become a commodity over time, software seems, like music or poetry, to have infinite potential for innovation and malleability. True, it may have, answers Mr Carr, but what matters is not whether a nifty programmer can still come up with new and cool code, but how quickly any such programme can be replicated by rival companies. Besides, today's reality in the software industry has nothing to do with poetry or music. Many companies are furious about the bug-ridden, pricey and over-engineered systems that they bought during the bubble era and are doing their best to switch to simple, off-the-shelf software, offered in “enterprise-resource planning” packages and the like. If there is any customisation at all, it tends to be done by outside consultants, who are likely to share their favours with other clients.

But surely Mr Carr does not appreciate the impressive pipeline of new technologies that is about to hit the market—the wireless gadgets, the billions of tiny radio-frequency identity tags that will turn Aspirin bottles, shirt collars, refrigerator doors and almost everything else into smart machines, and so on? Those are impressive indeed, says Mr Carr. But again, the issue is whether they will be proprietary technologies or open infrastructures. And everything points to the latter.

This is not a debate for the ivory tower. Since IT can no longer be a source of strategic advantage, Mr Carr urges CIOs to spend less on their data-centres, to opt for cheaper commodity equipment wherever possible, to follow their rivals rather than trying to outdo them with fancy new systems, and to focus more on IT's vulnerabilities, from viruses to data theft, than on its opportunities. As it happens, CIOs have been taking exactly this approach for the past three years, and their bosses like it that way. Perhaps all they needed was an erudite way to justify this new sobriety. “It seemed like there was this role open and I just wandered into it,” says Mr Carr.