Just Another Earthshaking RevolutionJust Another Earthshaking Revolution

Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call it The Groundswell. Nicholas Carr calls it The Big Switch. Tom Hayes calls it the Jump Point. Whatever it is, it's clearly going to involve major earthshaking.Now is probably no more fertile a time for hyperbolic business/technology theories than usual, but there's certainly plenty of exclamation going on in tech punditry at the moment: social networking, YouTube, and user-generated content "are all elements of a social phenomenon -- the groundswell -- that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works," Li and Bernoff intone in their new book.

Carr's The Big Switch, we are told, is "a sweeping and often disturbing look at how a new computer revolution is reshaping business, society and culture."

And Silicon Valley guru Hayes, in a book that Guy Kawasaki calls "the tipping point for geeks," proclaims that "the new economy will arrive at a single jump point by 2011, bringing with it virulent market trends." Sounds like I'd better get a flu shot.

All of these Great Leaps Forward are being brought on, the authors assert, by some form of Web-based technology: social networking in the case of Groundswell, cloud computing in the case of The Big Switch, "network culture" in the case of Jump Point. And they coincide with a development that, from here, looks like a truly big shift: the symbiosis of Google and IBM.

"IBM and Google plan to exploit their common technological world view and considerable talent to build a worldwide network, or cloud, of servers from which consumers and businesses will tap everything from online soccer schedules to advanced engineering applications," reports information's Paul McDougall. "It's the story of our lifetime," said Google chairman Eric Schmidt during a joint appearance with Sam Palmisano, IBM's CEO, at an IBM conference earlier this week. Indeed, the union of the world's most formidable Internet search-and-advertising company with the leading technology services provider on the planet could preview the big shift that Carr (who five years ago this week, in a now-famous essay, claimed that IT "doesn't matter" any more) is now heralding.

Or not. In The Shock Of The Old: Technology And Global History Since 1900, British historian David Edgerton offers a counterintuitive argument: "the innovation-centric account" of technology has severely overestimated the role that new technology plays in bringing progress and creating new businesses, often overshadowing the critical role that new applications of older technologies (such as horsepower in World War II) play in changing the world.

In that view, the era of cloud computing, in the developed West, may grab the headlines, while the exploding use of 60-year-old cell phone technology in China and India may actually have a more transformative effect.

Anyway, all of these temblors may not hold a candle to the real geological thing: Northern California consultancy Risk Management Solutions recently predicted that economic disruption from an earthquake on the scale of the 1868 disaster, a magnitude 6.7 quake on the Hayward Fault, would exceed $165 billion and likely bring on a worldwide depression.

Now that's a groundswell.