"Carr's categorical assertions must be challenged. Information technologies are too important to be pronounced as irrele-vant. Such news is prematurely injurious to the health of our economy."
-Paul Strassmann, Executive Advisor, NASA; Former CIO of General Foods, Kraft, Xerox, DoD and NASA

"When IT became over-hyped, we were a little concerned about the promises that were being made during those times. At this stage, in a sense, you could say IT's almost under-hyped ... the most extreme [example] was probably the Harvard Business Review of suggesting that railroads and IT had a certain similarity, and now that the tracks have been laid, there was no competitive advantage to be had from having better IT systems."
-Bill Gates, CEO, Microsoft

"Even technology that's a commodity still provides business flexibility."
-Tony Scott, CTO General Motors

"The fundamental point is this. The move to a common infrastructure does not reduce the opportunities for competitive advantage; it increases them."
-Vijay Gurbaxani, Professor, University of California

"[Carr] absolutely misses the point … information technology puts value into goods and services, which are intellectual goods in one form of another … As a nation and as a company you either upgrade your IT infrastructure or you won't be competitive."
-Craig Barrett, Chief Executive, Intel Corporation

"Extracting business value from IT requires innovations in business practices. In many respects, we believe Carr attacks a red herring--few people would argue that IT alone provides any significant business value or strategic advantage. Carr's article is dangerous because it endorses the growing view that IT offers only limited potential for strategic differentiation."
-John Seely Brown, Former Chief Scientist, Xerox and John Hagel, Management Consultant and Author

"It is premature to think that IT has reached its plateau. It is as if someone claimed that the telephone reached its strategic plateau when the top 25 companies had access to it. Like the telephone, IT is a network phenomenon. Wal-Mart for example, benefits from their IT investment more as more of their supplier base is IT-enabled."
-Rajiv Gupta, father of e-services (later re-labelled Web ser-vices), Chairman and CTO, Confluent Software

"Surely one of the great inanities of 2003 is Harvard Business Review's May 2003 article, "IT Doesn't Matter." From the other coast, we're getting the same message from Larry Ellison [Oracle Corp.], claiming that tech has become mature--only a few big companies will dominate, as in the car industry. And Larry's out to prove his case with M&A silliness. As it turns out, Larry and HBR are half right, and therefore totally wrong."
-George F. Colony, CEO and President, Forrester Research

"Think of IT like the food that comes into a restaurant--yes, the meat and vegetables most restaurants use are commodities that anyone can buy themselves, but what the restaurant does with the food is what really matters."
-Chad Dickerson, CTO of Infoworld

"Carr simply misunderstands what information technology is."
-David Kirkpatrick, Fortune Magazine

"In no other area is it more important to have a sense of what you don't know than it is in IT management. The most dangerous advice to CEOs has come from people who either had no idea of what they didn't know, or from those who pretended to know what they didn't. Couple not knowing what you don't know with fuzzy logic, and you have the makings of Nicholas Carr's article."
-F. Warren McFarlan, Richard L. Nolan, Professors, Har-vard Business School

"The use of IT is analogous to innovations in transportation, not power utilities. Common standards like roads and airports exist, but the cars we choose to drive and our methods of travel are based on individual preference. IT utilities will exist, but businesses will derive unique benefits from how they lev-erage specific technologies. I just think of walking into our living room and telling my kids that we now have a 'TV Utility' and the only channel we get is C-SPAN. I don't think they would consider this a step forward."
- Mark S. Lewis, Executive Vice President,
EMC Corporation

"Our fundamental response to that [article] is: hogwash."
-Steve Ballmer, CEO and President, Microsoft

"The argument in 'IT Doesn't Matter' goes roughly like this: Kidneys don't matter. Kidneys are basically a commodity. Just about everyone has kidneys. There is no evidence that CEOs with superior kidneys are more successful than CEOs with average kidneys. In fact, CEOs who spend more on their kid-neys often don't do as well."
-Steven Alter, Professor of Information Systems, University of San Francisco School of Business and Management