Nick Carr KOs Another Straw Man
When last heard from, heavyweight commenter Nick Carr was flattening IT -- dismissing it as no more important than facilities and treasury -- interesting, even important corporate functions that provide no competitive advantage. His book, Does IT Matter?, prescribed "IT as utility," a back-office function that should be managed as a cost center with a mandate to run at the lowest possible cost.
In Carr's unique world perspective, competitive advantage is defined as something that provides a permanent lead over other market players. And, because IT can't guarantee permanence, it should be relegated to the nether regions of G&A. In his book, he cites a pharmaceutical company that created a drug-ordering application and cleaned up in the pharmacy business because its systems were so much easier to use than the manual alternatives from other providers. After 10 or so years, however, the rise of the Internet made its clunky client/server app obsolete, so ... IT is irrelevant.
This is a classic case of creating a straw man by defining a situation that in fact doesn't exist, and then destroying it with arguments that point out its shortcomings. Carr put the straw man of "IT can provide permanent competitive advantage" into the ring and then delivered a quick right hook that left it unconscious on the mat. There was only one problem with this match -- his knockout was a fixed fight.
There is no such thing as permanent competitive advantage, not in IT, marketing, manufacturing, not anywhere. And I can guarantee that most companies would kill for a 10 year competitive advantage, even knowing that it would not be permanent.
Carr has now brought a new straw man into the ring. This fight is with open source, and his argument is that open source isn't really that open -- that the supposed advantage of thousand of distributed contributors actually is a handicap, and that the real truth is that open source only works if a few real innovators hatch the product while the rest of the hangers-on provide some minimal testing capabilities.
In Carr's view, real invention is the realm of a few super-creative types with the rest of the world relegated to awestruck admiration. Consequently, the "bazaar" notion of open source posited by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar is naive or even pernicious, being as it lures people into thinking
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In Carr's unique world perspective, competitive advantage is defined as something that provides a permanent lead over other market players. And, because IT can't guarantee permanence, it should be relegated to the nether regions of G&A. In his book, he cites a pharmaceutical company that created a drug-ordering application and cleaned up in the pharmacy business because its systems were so much easier to use than the manual alternatives from other providers. After 10 or so years, however, the rise of the Internet made its clunky client/server app obsolete, so ... IT is irrelevant.
This is a classic case of creating a straw man by defining a situation that in fact doesn't exist, and then destroying it with arguments that point out its shortcomings. Carr put the straw man of "IT can provide permanent competitive advantage" into the ring and then delivered a quick right hook that left it unconscious on the mat. There was only one problem with this match -- his knockout was a fixed fight.
There is no such thing as permanent competitive advantage, not in IT, marketing, manufacturing, not anywhere. And I can guarantee that most companies would kill for a 10 year competitive advantage, even knowing that it would not be permanent.
Carr has now brought a new straw man into the ring. This fight is with open source, and his argument is that open source isn't really that open -- that the supposed advantage of thousand of distributed contributors actually is a handicap, and that the real truth is that open source only works if a few real innovators hatch the product while the rest of the hangers-on provide some minimal testing capabilities.
In Carr's view, real invention is the realm of a few super-creative types with the rest of the world relegated to awestruck admiration. Consequently, the "bazaar" notion of open source posited by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar is naive or even pernicious, being as it lures people into thinking
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