Nicholas Carr quotes Alexander Galloway:
“the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom - control has existed from the beginning.”
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog
Mr. Carr is driving at the fact that it's no longer the World Wide Web, it's the World Wide Computer. I agree with Carr's history - the personal computer started as a tool for working outside the control of centralized mainframe computing, but computing was re-centralized with LANs and networks. Then the WWW came and broke it open again, but control is back.
I've spent my career at the fulcrum of this issue. I'm strongly committed to the personal computing paradigm, but I'm a control freak, especially when it comes to how business data is created, used, managed, searched and analyzed. I've therefore specialized in applications that enable collaboration in the creation of content empowering users to do their own thing, while working within tightly managed bounds of policy or other structures.
We're now entering a new phase in the constantly shifting personal vs. control seesaw. Cloud computing, to use on popular label, leverages controlled, centralized servers with end user (or at least IT provided) gadgets that enable work to be performed anywhere, anytime on any device. The interesting paradox is that to enable maximum end-user freedom, very strong control over resources is required. These resources may be decentralized and even from disparate and even competing sources, but each "server" is itself tightly controlled.
I don't disagree with Carr's assessment, but I'm more hopeful about how it will pan out.
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