A remarkably comprehensive treatment of an ever-changing commercial landscape.
A thorough consideration of the future of digital commerce.
When the information technology industry first emerged, it was largely conceived as a tool for larger corporations. It’s since become more focused on the consumer, leading to truly innovative leaps in technology. According to this book, innovation was once mostly an “inside-out” process that moved from proprietary technologies and organizational control to the public, but now it’s becoming “outside-in,” focusing on public collaboration, customer participation, and the sharing of an IT ecosystem. In general, innovation is shifting to a human platform, argues Moschella (Customer-Driven IT, 2003, etc.), a research fellow at the Leading Edge Forum, the “thought leadership arm” of DXC Technology, a $25 billion global IT services provider. He says that the line between work and play has become blurred, as have the boundaries between the virtual and the real. This change has birthed new professional requirements, as well—the ideal executive, Moschella says, will be fluent in the languages of business and IT, as corporations need “double-deep” workers who understand the industry in its totality. All of these changes are effecting a monumental movement from cloud computing to “the Matrix,” which the author defines as an “increasingly intelligent societal infrastructure.” The further integration of the digital into every aspect of human life, he says, will cause industries to explore “cross-industry capabilities”: horizontal expansion into multiple types of industries. Moschella panoramically assesses the consequences of these transformations for the IT industry as a whole, considering not only their opportunities, but also their potential risks and ethical pitfalls. Moschella’s expert command of the industry’s history is extraordinary. His book is subdivided into digestible questions, which he tackles concisely with a relentless emphasis on the power of pictorial illustration. Indeed, nearly every page comes complete with some kind of visual aid—charts, graphs, illustrations, lists of terms. The author’s prose can sometimes be quite dense, however, and it traffics liberally in the gratuitously technical jargon that’s typical of the IT world. That said, he clearly isn’t aiming his book at an audience of untutored neophytes. One of the principal strengths of this work is its sweeping breadth, as Moschella traverses an expansive stretch of intellectual territory. His consideration of China’s economic rivalry with the United States, for example, is especially impressive; while the Asian country will continue to support its monopoly on its own domestic market and remain a burgeoning IT powerhouse, the author says, there will still be plenty of opportunities for American businesses, as well as for those in a rising India. The author also prudently withholds self-assured predictions, when appropriate. For example, when he considers the cultural impact of a shift to the Matrix, which seems to involve a diminishment of individual privacy, he exercises impressive restraint: “while social media has enabled a great many important innovations, the expectation that we will expose our full selves to everyone represents a major psychological and cultural shift, whose end effects are still far from clear.”
A remarkably comprehensive treatment of an ever-changing commercial landscape.Pub Date: July 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-11344-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: DXC Technology
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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