Nick Carr: Still wrong on Google, Part 2
mathewingram.com/work —
... I came back from a weekend away to find that Nick Carr had picked a fight with Tim O’Reilly about Google, and whether the company’s size and market power has been a result of network effects. This argument was a sort of spin-off of an issue that came up earlier in the week, when Hugh McLeod pondered the topic of “cloud computing” and whether it ...
There is more to Web domination than Web 2.0
The Open Road —
... In Tim's case, the principle is Web 2.0. It's a good idea with serious implications for building businesses on the Web, but it has come to explain too much for him. Tim dismisses cloud computing's potential to harness big systems to earn gargantuan returns (and monopoly power) on the web, suggesting instead that Web 2.0, or the harnessing of collective intelligence to make applications better the more people use them, is the key to "market domination" (my words, not his). However, as pointed out astutely by Nick Carr , Tim's single-best example of Web 2.0 dominance - Google - ...
Network Effects in Data
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. —
Nick Carr's difficulty in understanding my argument that cloud computing is likely to end up a low-margin business unless companies find some way to harness the network effects that are the heart of Web 2.0 made me realize that I use the term "network effects" somewhat differently, and not in the simplistic way many people understand it.
Here's Nick:
Let's stop here, and take a look at the big kahuna on the Net, Google, which O'Reilly lists as the first example of a business that has grown to dominance thanks to the network effect. Is ...
Who Wins in the Cloud, and Why?
Know It All —
... , and also a nice neat summary of what people really mean when they talk about the cloud (briefly, Utility computing, e.g., Amazon's web services; Platform as a Service, e.g., Google AppEngine and Salesforce's force.com; and Cloud-based end-user applications.)
Back on the big-think side, Nick Carr challenges O'Reilly's view that the network effect (O'Reilly: "applications win if they get better the more people use them") is the sole arbiter of success in the 2.0 world, pointing to examples of "superior product and software design, superb marketing and branding, smart ...
Who owns the keys to the clouds?
The Inquisitr » Technology —
... at Microsoft’s PDC of the Windows Azure Platform the company has made it quite plain that it plans on being a dominant player in the cloud marketplace.
This announcement follows on the heels of a week or so of interesting discussions about cloud computing that was started out by Tim O’Reilly’s post on October 26th called Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing which dragged in such luminaries as Nicholas Carr, Mathew Ingram and Alan Patrick.
While the discussion was ...
Book Review: Nick Carr’s Big Switch
Technology Liberation Front —
... interested in the ongoing debate about cloud computing — and specifically the question of how much competition we can expect going forward — you’ll definitely want to check out this very interesting discussion taking place between Hugh Macleod, Tim O’Reilly, and Nick Carr.
“The Cloud’s Best-Kept Secret” — Hugh Macleod
“Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” — Tim O’Reilly
“What Tim O’Reilly gets wrong about the cloud” — Nick Carr
“ ...
The Cloud Computing Monopoly Debate
InformationWeek - All Stories And Blogs —
... 2005, Google, Amazon, ebay, craigslist, wikipedia, and all other other Web 2.0 superstar applications have this in common. Cloud computing, at least in the sense that Hugh seems to be using the term, as a synonym for the infrastructure level of the cloud as best exemplified by Amazon S3 and EC2, doesn't have this kind of dynamic.
The cloud computing business will be huge, but it may be more similar to the web hosting and ISP markets, which are also huge, but not hugely profitable. Nick Carr counters OReillys argument by quoting some of his own words back at him that seem ...
Cloud Computing Is More Than a Computer in the Cloud
ReadWriteWeb —
... assumption that these cloud-based resources are an extension of the corporate data center; a way to simply reduce the costs of enterprise computing.
There is value down this road, but there are bigger opportunities.
Nick Carr is among those who fear that a small number of players may come to dominate the provision of cloud resources. He outlines many of these arguments in his latest book, The Big Switch, and more recently had an interesting discussion with Tim O'Reilly on the topic. Justin Leavesley shares some of ...
How Nicholas Carr uses Google's Scale Argument Against Tim O'Reilly
Google Watch —
... What's more interesting to me about this is how Nicholas "The Big Switch" Carr uses what I'll call Varian's scale-doesn't-matter argument to bludgeon Tim O'Reilly's points about scale in the Web 2.0 world. It's a wonderful pissing contest between two of the finer minds in high-tech academia. ...



