The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Carr's central analogy is between electrification and computation: just as factories replaced private generators with utility power from the grid, companies would replace private data centers with computing delivered as a service over the network. He wrote this in 2008, anticipating the cloud computing shift roughly five years before most of the industry took it seriously. The historical half of the book traces how the electric utility model destroyed some industries, created others, and concentrated power in ways that the original inventors did not foresee. The second half applies the pattern to computing infrastructure and asks what happens to organizations, labor, and competition when processing becomes a metered utility. The historical parallel is the book's real contribution — it provides a framework for thinking about infrastructure transitions that remains useful well beyond the specific case of cloud.