When Harvard Business Review published Nicholas Carr’s 2004 book, Does IT Matter?, the reaction was incendiary. Carr argued that technological, economic, and competitive forces were combining to transform the role IT plays in business, and that technology had become a commodity that doesn’t provide competitive advantages. Two Harvard business professors were among the many readers who declared Carr, in essence, clueless.
At the time, the legal IT community was not amused. How dare he! We support vast infrastructures with multiple application platforms used by highly intellectual users. To show Carr how wrong he was we invested in greener data centers, virtualization, and, of course, cloud computing.
