Critique of the Article of Carr’s: It Doesn’t Matter

Nicholas Carr’s HBR article, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” published in the year 2003 started an upsurge of discussion in the world of business.

The basic idea the author cites in the article is IT no longer serves as the creator of a company’s strategic advantage.  That’s because when these technologies become ubiquitous, they transform into a commodity, and no commodity creates a competitive advantage continuously, as railroads and electricity have shown.  

Although the article is successful in stimulating the readers to rethink the role of IT in business by using such a controversial title, it provides little evidence to back the arguments, and some points provided in the article contradict with other claims.

In the first part of the article, the author tries to establish an assumption that only scarcity can be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage.  Based on such assumption, the author pushes available and affordable IT to the opposite side — ubiquity, which means companies can not gain competitive advantage by investing in IT that any rival can easily get.  In order to make the argument solid, the author limits the core functions of IT within data storage, data processing and data transport.  These three functions of IT may be ubiquitous, but they are not all of it.  It’s not the IT tools but the innovative way of using IT that matters.  

The author goes on to distinguish the concept between proprietary technologies and infrastructural technologies.  A pharmaceutical firm example is given to support his argument that only proprietary technologies like drug patent provide strategic advantage.  In addition, the author states that “a few companies may still be able to wrest advantages from highly specialized applications that don’t offer strong economic incentives for replication will be the exceptions.”  In other words, the author believes that as long as IT is well protected by the company or costs too much for rivals to propagate, it can constantly...