Ever since Nicholas G. Carr's now historic Harvard Business Review article, "IT Doesn't Matter," published in the May 2003 edition of HBR, it was only a matter of time before the wider world caught up with Carr's thesis. The article formed only a small part of Carr's broader exploration of the influence of information technology on business strategy contained in his book Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, but it is the "IT Doesn't Matter" chapter that sticks in everybody's mind.

In it, Carr argued that while IT infrastructure is essential to competitiveness, particularly at the regional and industry level, it's no longer a source of advantage at the company level. In other words, it doesn't enable individual companies to distinguish themselves in a meaningful way from their competitors. While essential to competitiveness, argued Carr, IT has become inconsequential to strategic advantage. IT is best viewed (and managed) nowadays, he concluded, as a commodity.

Of course he never truly meant that IT "didn't matter"; he merely wanted the business community to understand that it could no longer rely on it as a source of competitive advantage.

Now that the JavaOne techfest has come and gone, but with the LinuxWorld Expo still to come, everyone and his dog is naturally busy commenting, interpreting, opining, and dissecting...so at JDJ we thought it might be useful to do a round-up of some of what is being said about the state of technology, the Internet, e-commerce, and all things related. We will publish them in next month's issue. Already we can reveal that one thing emerges above all else: technology is back - most especially Internet technologies such as search, storage, and security. It is these three items together that are putting the "i" back into i-technology in a big way.

How else can you explain why the (possible) market value of Google, Inc., seems likely to be as high as $36 billion, rivaling corporate IT stalwarts such as McDonald's Corp. and Sony Corp? Search is still very much the new frontier so far as the Internet is concerned. How else can you account for the growth of storage giants like EMC and security giants like Cisco, which as long ago as 2000 was being labeled "the quiet security giant" as the undisputed king of switches and routers began rapidly to make a name for itself in the security arena?

Without the Internet and the technologies related to it there would be no U.S. stock market uptick in process. So Bill Gates didn't really need to launch the broadside he did in his speech at Microsoft's CEO Summit on May 21 last year:

And so when somebody says, to take the extreme quote from the Harvard Business Review article, they say IT doesn't matter, they must be saying that with all this information flow, we've either achieved a limit where it's just perfect, everybody sees exactly what they want, or we've gotten to a point where it simply can't be improved - and that's where we'd object very strenuously.

Because that wasn't ever Carr's point. What his HBR article was arguing was that we're at the stage in the business/technology cycle where any technological improvement in the management of information will be quickly and broadly copied, rendering it meaningless for competitive advantage. Not that information technology, the Internet, and all kindred phenomena no longer matter. Far less that improvement is no longer possible. Software developers everywhere - and CIOs, CTOs, and CSOs too - certainly think it matters, perhaps more than ever. Just as Gates does, and Messrs. McNealy, Ellison, Dell, and Palmisano. That is why the "i" is so firmly back in i-technology. And why, in turn, the "P" is back in IPO.