I had a good look at The Big Switch tonight in Barnes and Noble here in Bellevue. As I often do with books like this, I flipped to the appendix to see who was covered and ended up reading a few pages on Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie. Then I put the book down, smoothed over the cover and decided "no, I'm not buying it". Not because I didn't like what I'd read - quite the contrary. I enjoyed Carr's balanced view that came across in those few pages.

Something else came across though - this book is out of date already. That's no criticism of the author and he would be first to admit it I'm sure but by the time I got around to reading it (I'm a very slow reader) it would be really out of date. Things like the Yahoo deal are of course not in the book, nor the recent outage from Amazon. Therein lies the problem for the traditional paper medium when dealing with topics like this - they offer a sound historical and analytical perspective but seismic shifts happen too quickly on the web.

I can get a good view too from my friends like Jas who just reviewed the book but tonight marked a turning point for me with books. 3 years ago I would have spent hours in that bookstore and come out with an armful of books. No more. I'm clearing my Amazon wish list of anything that is time bound like this. That's if Amazon's wish list doesn't rely on their S3 service of course :)

(Doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to Mary Jo Foley's Microsoft 2.0 though)