Give them each $100 million. No strings attached. So will these companies be equally better off in their rivalry with each other because they each have $100 million to invest? Of course not. Some of the companies will enjoy significantly greater returns on their free $100 million investment than the others. Capital is a commodity, right? Yet somehow we consistently see enormous disparities within industries in their return on capital. We could keep feeding these companies free capital and the disparities would persist. Would Harvard Business Review publish "Capital Doesn't Matter"? Capital is a commodity, right? Would Harvard Business Review publish "Capital Doesn't Matter"? Suppose, instead, we offer these business rivals equal access to the very best and very brightest graduates from Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and MIT. Should we rightly expect each and every company to get comparable value from this incredibly rich talent pool? Or does realityand bitter experiencedictate that some companies will manage to get incredible performance from truly mediocre talents while others will blithely waste the time, effort and energy of their most gifted hires? Perhaps Harvard Business Review should print "Talent Doesn't Matter." Now let's give every single employee of every single company his very own free Wi-Fi-ed Linux laptop, PDA and cell phone along with all the training and technical support he needs. Free. Does anybody in their right mind believe that this huge endowment in personal technological capacity will equally lift the productivity and profitability of these competitors?Those three simple thought experiments affirm an undeniable truth: It's not free and easy access to a commodity that determines its strategic economic value to the company; it is the way that commodity is managed that determines its impact. Management matters. The idea that companies can divorce their resourcesno matter how cheap, powerful and ubiquitousfrom the act of managing them is patently absurd.This should come as no surprise to any serious reader of, say, CIO magazine or even Harvard Business Review. Yet the very premise of "IT Doesn't Matter" is that the quality of management matters far less than the quantity of the commodity. The more persuasive argument is that the quality of IT management matters even more as the IT commodity becomes ubiquitous.Carr insists at great length that the quality of management doesn't matter because IT is really an "infrastructure" technology like electricity, the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. IT, he argues, ultimately devolves into commoditized ubiquity, like lightbulbs and telephones. Infrastructure technologiesas opposed to proprietary technologiesinherently preclude opportunity for sustainable competitive advantage.But why should IT be treated more like electricity and automobile engines than such media as telephones and television? Don't companies creatively use call centers and television advertisements to cost-effectively manage customer interaction and build brand equity? Would Carr suggest that Coca-Cola treat television advertisements as commodities? Should Dell treat its call centers as commodities? In truth, IT is more a suite of techniques than an arsenal of technologies. So why does Carr compare IT to the way power utilities are organized instead of, say, the way factories are organized? Why not IT as