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You Sound Like an Idiot When You Call Software Engineering “IT”

Save your business by distinguishing between baseline IT and making novel software.

Mikael Vesavuori
19 min readAug 5, 2024

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As in all fields, there are heretical scriptures even in the paper-dry world of IT. One of these is Nicholas Carr’s “IT Doesn’t Matter”.

To put the article in context, it was published in 2003 as a short piece in Harvard Business Review and immediately sparked huge controversy for claiming, among other things, that:

  • It’s time to cut back on IT spending: After years of substantial IT investments, he said the naughty thing that riled up countless vendors—it’s time to reduce spending on IT. Just imagine Steve “Developers Developers Developers” Ballmer, but angry.
  • IT is a commodity: Carr claimed that IT had become commoditized, meaning it was widely accessible and no longer provided a competitive advantage simply by having more of it.
  • Generic software replaces custom development: Software would become more standardized and capable of meeting business needs without extensive custom development.

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