Nicholas Carr's Argument Analysis

INTRODUCTION

In the year 2003, Nicholas Carr published a debatable article that made many view the world of information technology quite differently. Carr’s article focused on the idea of information technology being widespread, ubiquitous, and part of the state in which information technology has become a commodity infrastructure and has therefore lost its ability to provide a competitive edge or strategic advantage for business growth and profitability at the company level. As a result, he said, companies should rethink how much they pay for IT given this reduced return on investment.

My critique, therefore, is an argument against the rationality of Carr’s article and provides contras to Carr’s belief of how non-proprietary IT infrastructure

Lastly, he claims that IT can no longer be used to gain a strategic competitive advantage. To provide evidence for his argument, Carr states that the only way to gain an edge over competitors is to offer something they cannot. To this point he mentions that if a competitor finds something hard to replicate, it is an advantage. The core point to his argument is that as long as the technology remains proprietary, it can provide strategic advantage and that it has strategic potential.

Later in the article, Carr counters his arguments above by stating that, “some specialized applications that do not offer strong economic incentive for replication” will survive. It would seem that if these specialized applications do survive there is a good reason why they survived and it is probably tied to the openness of current IT systems and not purely economic

He even considers them “insignificant”. His discussion about the power generation industry, the electric utilities industry, and the rail-line industry are relevant from the viewpoint of technological advancement, however it is not nearly as impressive as the advances made with computers and microchips produced today, which runs a million times faster than a 1960s' computer, and cost significantly less. It can also be pointed out that all of the industries he mentioned are still in business today and are still profitable whether they are considered commodities or infrastructural technologies or not. Carr’s arguments were, again, conceptual at best and presented in a very basic