Nick Carr's "Does IT Matter?"

Via Future Now:

I'm off to the bookshop....

Nick Carr's "Does IT Matter?"

As nearly everyone knows, in November 2002, Harvard Business Review published an article by executive editor Nicholas Carr entitled "IT Doesn't Matter." The piece immediately became the subject of great controversy, and generated a number of responses, some of them quite detailed and thoughtful, others at the "IT does TOO matter!" level.

Carr has now published a book (once again with Harvard Business School Press, the same outfit that publishes HBR) titled Does IT Matter? Having nothing else to do (hah), I picked up a copy of it, and thought I would write about the book as I read it.

I was inspired to buy the book by an article by Bob Metcalfe in the latest Technology Review taking Carr to task. Overall, Metcalfe's essay doesn't strike me as very strong-- it's got too many ad hominem attacks (Carr has a Web site, ergo IT really does matter)-- but he makes the good point that the definition of "IT" is constantly shifting, and constitutes too much of a moving target to be described in the fixed ways that Carr does."