If you were born in the U.S.A. (apologies to Bruce Springsteen), you have memories of July 4th.  My favorite memories are mainly from my youth when we would celebrate the nation’s birthday and my grandfather’s birthday (July 4, 1888) with our family reunion.  Aunts, uncles, cousins; it was a well-attended event and we would have a softball game or two if the weather cooperated.  Many of my relatives were farmers and July 4th was a date that generally didn’t conflict with planting or harvesting a crop.   A senior family member or the local pastor would say a prayer before the buffet-style lunch was available.  I can’t remember an opening prayer where it wasn’t stated that we were thankful.

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Nicholas Carr is known to many for his book,
Does IT Matter His new book, The Big Switch, is just as provocative and one that I recommend for stimulating your thinking about many of our businesses today.  Carr provides the reader with a background on the electric industry and its evolution from private company and municipality driven systems to standardized and large public utilities empowering the widespread usage of electrical appliances.  He envisions a similar transformation with computers and cites the widespread influence of “server farms” being established by Google, Microsoft, Dell, Yahoo!,
and IBM.  Carr predicts that computing power and consistency will be as standardized and as inexpensive as electricity at some point in the future.  The prohibitive costs of establishing a business utilizing computers will decline substantially, resulting in the empowerment of individuals to begin, manage, and grow large-scale businesses, capitalizing on their intellectual property.  Monetary capital won’t be the driver, intellectual capital will be.

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