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Obscurantism in the Cloud

Nicholas Carr's "IT Does not Matter" Fallacy and "Everything in the Cloud" Utopia

Version 1.01

Obscurantism (French: obscurantisme, from the Latin obscurans, "darkening") is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known.

Obscurantism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nick Carr made his name with the provocative Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter" (free version here), its expansion into a less definitively titled book Does IT Matter? and his generally erudite blog. The charge of irrelevance hit the industry hard and elicited mostly incoherent and ineffective rebuttals (e.g. "hogwash"), which hampered real discussion of Carr's argument.

Charles Fitzgerald

"Carr's vision is either utopian or dystopian, depending on how you look at it, but either way, it mixes a few likely trends with lots of naive wishful thinking, unsound logic, and sophomoric shock value."

Comment to The IT department is dead,
NetworkWorld.com, 01/07/2008

Abstract

Nicholas Carr's provocative HBR article published five years ago and subsequent books suffer from the lack of understanding of IT history, electrical transmission networks (which he uses as a close historical analogy) and "in the cloud" software service provider model (SaaS). He cherry-picks historical facts to fit his needs instead of trying to describe real history of development of each of those three technologies. To be more correct Carr tortures facts to get them to fit his fantasy. The central idea of the article "IT does not matter" is simply a fallacy. At best Carr managed to ask a couple of interesting questions, but provided inferior and misleading answers. While Carr is definitely a gifted writer, ignorance of technology about which he is writing leads him to absurd conclusions which due to his lucid writing style looks quite plausible for non-specialists and as such influence public opinion about IT. Still as a writer Carr comes across as a guy who can write engagingly about a variety of topics including those about which he knows almost nothing. Here lies the danger as only specialists can sense that that "Something Is Deeply Amiss" while ordinary readers tend to believe his aura of credibility emanating from the "former editor of HBR" title.

Unfortunately the charge of irrelevance of IT made by Carr was perfectly in sync with the higher management desire to accelerate outsourcing and Carr's 2003 HBR paper served as a kind of "IT outsourcing manifesto". And the fact that many people were sitting between chairs as for the value of IT outsourcing partially explains why his initial HBR article, as weak and detached from reality as it was, generated less effective rebuttals then it should. This paper is an attempt to provide a more coherent analysis of the main components of Carr's fallacious vision five years after the event.

If one looks closer at what Carr propose, it is evident that this is a pretty reactionary and defeatist framework which I would call "IT obscurantism" and which is not that different from "creativism". Like with the latter, his justifications are extremely weak and consist of one hand of usage of fuzzy facts and questionable analogies, on the other putting forward radical, absurd recommendations ("Spend less", "Follow, don't lead", "Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities" and "move to utility-based 'in the cloud' computing") which can hurt anybody who trusts them or, worse, tries blindly adopt them.

The irony of Carr's position is that for the five years since the publication of his HBR article local datacenters actually flourished and until 2008 had shown no signs of impeding demise. In 2008 credit crush hit data centers hard, but they are just collateral damage of the financial storm. From 2003 to 2008 Data Centers experienced just another technological reorganization which increased role of Intel computers in the datacenter including appearance of blades, as alternatives to small to midrange servers, virtualization, wireless technologies and distributed computing (clusters). Moreover while there was some trend to the consolidation of datacenters within the large companies, the new power of laptops make "in the cloud" services promise pretty fuzzy as in no way remote datacenter can provide the same amount computer power as modern laptops. While perfect for such services as email, and (to lesser extent) Web browsing and in general, media consumption (which success of iPad demonstrated so vividly), for any computationally intensive application (for example, spreadsheets) promise of cloud computing become much less attractive, unless what we mean under the term is "application delivery". Security issues related to the move to private cloud are mindboggling. In May 2012 IBM has forbidden its employees from using cloud-based services such as Siri, Dropbox and iCloud.[IBM's Ban]. Revealed in June 2013 Prism program puts large cloud providers such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo in the black list for any person interested in maintaining at lease minimal level of privacy still possible within the limits of current technology.

The author argues that the level of hype about "cloud computing" makes prudent treating all promoters of this interesting new technology, especially those who severely lack technical depth, with extreme skepticism. The key problem is that along with technical challenges Carr does not understand, in the cloud" services present huge threat to security and privacy. Also monopolization by cloud providers like Google of email and other services present a serious challenge to people's privacy. They are supposed to provide us with the best search. Now they are everywhere: maps, shopping, trying to kill Expedia and the rest of the travel sites. Pretty soon there won't be anyone out there to buy from, to do some price comparisons, or bookings options. Just Google. That's spooky.

Contrary to Carr prognostications the driving force behind the cloud is the desire to synchronize and access data from several PCs people own (desktop and laptop), smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. In other words to access your own data from multiple devices. The first such application, ability to view corporate e-mail from the cell phone, essentially launched Blackberry smartphones into prominence.

Junk science is and always was based on cherry-picked evidence which has carefully been selected or edited to support a pre-selected "truth". Facts that are not fit are suppressed in best obscurantist traditions. This article tries to present the other side of the story.

Introduction

"Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge
but an outcome of cultural and political struggle."

Londa Schiebinger

Like a good Slashdot troll the slogan "IT does not matter" is catchy, provocative, and wrong. In his article "IT does not matter", published in the May 2003 edition of the Harvard Business Review Nicholas Carr (WOW, this guy somehow managed to get a huge Wikipedia entry !) declared that information technology inevitably going the way of the railroads, the telegraph and electricity networks.

Along with this revelation, he made several pretty bizarre predictions:

He also claimed that local corporate datacenters will disappear and happy users connected to "in the cloud" service providers via Internet (software as a service) will replace corporate programmers and system administrators. IT departments as we know them now, in his view, are doomed.
"Utility computing" will displace corporate IT facilities in the early 21st century, just as companies stopped generating their own electricity in early 20th century.

It appears that in order to attract readers (and parasite on outsourcing trend) Carr shaped his arguments mainly in terms of difference and opposition, almost as though any notion of traditional IT had to be rejected and the opposite (outsourcing friendly, cloud friendly) view embraced. But in no way simplistic opposition to traditional IT gives any validity to his views. On the contrary his views are more detached from reality that notion of traditional datacenter is. He also completely missed (or was unable to understand due to absence of relevant knowledge) huge threat to security and privacy that in the cloud providers entail.

We will try to prove in this paper, that each and every of Carr's postulates is pseudoscience, belonging to the same category as astrology, UFOs, and creationism. Especially the latter.

His article as well as two subsequent books are perfect examples, almost masterpieces of incompetent, self-deluding, self-serving obscurantism applied to information technology. I am using the term "obscurantism" here in the meaning close to one of the meanings of the term provided by Wikipedia :

In the 19th and 20th centuries "obscurantism" became a polemical term accusing authors of writing in a deliberately vague and abstruse style in order to hide their vacuousness: the writer's ignorance is obscured.

Unfortunately Carr oversimplified and sensationalist hypothesis was rather uncritically met by mainstream press. since the publication of his HRB article he was regularly invited to say outrageous things in stylish phrases on IT conferences.

His proselytizing of "IT does not matter" fallacy has granted him something like the status of a household name. But why does this nice gentleman seem to simultaneously attract and repel/annoy so many people? It may be the style of writings, as he is definitely a gifted writer, ably combining plausible nonsense about IT with an eye for the drama necessary for a big story. Or because he serves a useful for business role of an intellectual shock troop of the outsourcing movement.

This article is an attempt to analyze the main parts of his framework ( "(local) IT does not matter" and "Everything should be done via the cloud" ) as well as the recommendations which he provides ("Spend less", "Follow, don't lead", "Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities" and "move to utility-based "in the cloud" computing) five years after he published his HRB article. In way it is a late attempt to call a spade a spade and debunk propagated by Carr myths.

Carr pushes his hypothesis of inevitable switch to utility computing (based on nothing but superficial analogy with railways, telegraph and electricity networks) in the following way:

It’s no surprise, given these characteristics, that IT’s evolution has closely mirrored that of earlier infrastructural technologies.

... ... ...

The arrival of the Internet has accelerated the commoditization of IT by providing a perfect delivery channel for generic applications. More and more, companies will fulfill their IT requirements simply by purchasing fee-based “Web services” from third parties – similar to the way they currently buy electric power or telecommunications services.

... ... ...

From a strategic standpoint, they became invisible; they no longer mattered. That is exactly what is happening to information technology today, and the implications for corporate IT management are profound.

He also formulated all-encompassing "New Rules for IT Management", no more, no less:

With the opportunities for gaining strategic advantage from information technology rapidly disappearing, many companies will want to take a hard look at how they invest in IT and manage their systems. As a starting point, here are three guidelines for the future:

Spend less. Studies show that the companies with the biggest IT investments rarely post the best financial results. As the commoditization of IT continues, the penalties for wasteful spending will only grow larger. It is getting much harder to achieve a competitive advantage through an IT investment, but it is getting much easier to put your business at a cost disadvantage.

Follow, don't lead. Moore's Law guarantees that the longer you wait to make an IT purchase, the more you'll get for your money. And waiting will decrease your risk of buying something technologically flawed or doomed to rapid obsolescence. In some cases, being on the cutting edge makes sense. But those cases are becoming rarer and rarer as IT capabilities become more homogenized.

Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities. It's unusual for a company to gain a competitive advantage through the distinctive use of a mature infrastructural technology, but even a brief disruption in the availability of the technology can be devastating. As corporations continue to cede control over their IT applications and networks to vendors and other third parties, the threats they face will proliferate. They need to prepare themselves for technical glitches, outages, and security breaches, shifting their attention from opportunities to vulnerabilities

All three key recommendations listed above are extremely unprofessional and naive:

The first one is outdated, dangerous and detached from reality. The current IT spending in big corporations is around 1-3%(depending on industry, it is less then 1% in large manufacturing corporations ). What saving you can get slashing 1% 50%. Correct, that's 0.5%. And IT in many respect is company nerve system. As such this self-defeating, short-sited strategy when you endanger the nerve system of the corporation for marginal savings. What is required is competence, as corporate IT is inclines to spend money on Potemkin villages. But that does not mean that switching to "in the low cost in the cloud provider" can eliminate independence and greet on higher levels of IT. They probably can only amplify it.
The second one is extremely naive. With the following (and that typically means following recommendation of consultants from IBM, HP, etc) the key question here is not how much you get for your money, but how much you will spend for the maintenance and upgrades of useless junk they are trying to put through your throat ;-). It is like advising the Indians in the 1800s that you don't have to invest in rifles. Just wait 10 years and those rifles will be a lot cheaper. New software and hardware often allow to do things that old equipment can't and cut costs. Carr misinterprets and misapplies Moore's law to the process of depreciation of IT equipment. Often there are good business reasons to write down older equipment that is not even fully depreciated, if it can be replaced by cutting edge equipment with much lower maintenance costs. For example, for this reason some midrange IBM Power 5 servers now are replaced by entry level or midrange Dell servers with Intel 5160 CPUs like PE1950/PE2950. And the cost of those servers is just annual cost of hardware maintenance of older IBM Power 5 server. Such moves became sound strategy as soon as Intel 5160 CPUs were released (2006). So much for the follow, don't lead.
The last recommendation is extremely dangerous as we will discuss later: the key to minimization of "technical glitches, outages, and security breaches" is the "state of the art" IT architecture which naturally belongs to the category of "opportunities". This is an area were I spend several decades of my professional career and I can attest that there is no better way to waist a lot of money (millions for a large enterprise) then concentrate on vulnerabilities instead of opportunities which new technologies provide.
Carr does not understand that there is many ways to skin the cat and that cloud computing can exist at least in three variants:
- Public clouds are run by third parties and are available via public Internet. this is the only variant Mr. Carr understands.
- Private clouds are on-demand infrastructure owned by a single customer who controls which applications run, and where. They own the server, network, and disk storage and thus can decide which users are allowed to use the infrastructure.
- Hybrid clouds combine the public and private cloud models.

The key idea (actually a fallacy) of Carr's article and two books is absolutization of one of interesting (among several others) technical trend and arbitrary, not based on any competent analyses of the situation declaration that this trend is the future of IT. Being a gifted business writer, in case were Carr knows something about an industry, for example publishing , he usually comes out with some interesting and relevant observations (see, for example, his remarks about Wikipedia). But as for the key IT topics, his alarming lack of competence is evident and no amount of writing skills (and again, he is a gifted writer; that fact cannot be denied) can disguise that. That's why he ends up confusing the reader (and probably himself). The problem with incompetent, but prolific and aggressive writers (graphomans) acquiring undue influence along with pseudo-guru status is one of observations about Wikipedia made by Carr. The same problem is perfectly applicable to his own writing. As a result, as Carr correctly stated, "Small points get blown out of proportion - particularly those subject to debate - while big points get expressed poorly or glossed over."

Small points get blown out of proportion - particularly those subject to debate - while big points get expressed poorly or glossed over.

Carr outright dismissal of the relevance of local IT datacenters and waxing lyrical about "in the cloud" service providers (new utilities) is the worst type of primitive, incompetent IT Utopism. While "in the cloud" service providers represent one of several important technical trends and are useful for certain services (especially for one time computationally intensive tasks and testing) they are not panacea from all IT ills. Moreover "in the cloud" software service providers (or WAN-based distributed computing in more technical terms), have a lot more problems than many people realize, especially when they're under the influence of vendors' cozy brochures or articles like Carr's.

Carr can approach IT only as a sociologist; he does not have any real understanding of technologies involved. And he should probably stick to sociology, as he knows absolutely nothing about enterprise IT and complex tradeoff it involves. But unfortunately he discovered a gold mine as his musings can serve as a justification of outsourcing and he milked his initial controversy with two of his subsequent books and multiple appearances.

Carr can approach IT only as a sociologist; he does not have real understanding of technologies involved. And he should probably stick to sociology, as he knows nothing about enterprise IT

Due to the timing (end of dot-com bubble deflation) Carr oversimplified and sensationalist hypothesis became the fig leaf for justifying outsourcing. Carr himself soon became "traveling snake oil salesman" of sort. I think that the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and "IT does not matter" fallacy has common foundation -- modern culture (not necessary only American, despite a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the country) devalues knowledge and rationalism. While junk-science and a celebrity-focused culture might be financed by defenders of status quo, with "IT denialism" the reality is more complex. Carr understood all too well that promoters of miracle diets (corporate IT diet in this case) do well in the current environment and he just could not resist the temptation to milk the cow (although judging from the level of discounting of his used books on Amazon both his subsequent books proved to be paperweights)...

Carr grossly undervalued complexity of IT and the value of IQ in IT. Without local IQ it is impossible to copy technological advances, so Carr's statement "the article argues is that we're at the point where any technological improvement in the management of information will be quickly and broadly copied, rendering it meaningless for competitive advantage" is both wrong and extremely misleading. For example Snort is an zero-cost (open source) IDS. But the way, for example, I implement Snort cannot be replicated by other companies which do not have specialist of my caliber and thus they are unable to replicate the comparative advantage, despite availability of technology (and plain vanilla implementation actually provides comparative disadvantage, not enhancing security but creating an illusion of security ;-). The same thinking can be applied to Tivoli, OpenView, SAP/R3, Solaris and other complex products which require certification of specialists. Quoting a Microsoft executive: "the source of competitive advantage in business is what you do with the information that technology gives you access to." I would add that it also matters how you do it, what particular combination of technologies you use to achieve particular goals. In a way IT is part of the IQ and nerve system of modern organizations and weakening it has the same effect as weakening of brain functions and nerve system of living organisms.

Contents | Next

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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