TWIF+Chapter+2

Chapter 2 Carly Turley In Chapter two, Friedman describes the ten events that he believes to have flattened the world. He begins with the the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which tipped the balance of power across the world towards democratic free market and away from authoritarian rule. The second flattener is identified as our ability to not only author our own content, but to send it worldwide with the 1995 launch of the Internet. Subsequently, the third flattener, free workflow software was developed, allowing people from around the world to collaborate and work together on projects using a shared medium. As Apache and Wikipedia came into play, we became able to develop and upload web content and community collaboration became a fourth flattening force. Preparations for Y2K required resources beyond those available in the United States and as a result, we see that India became responsible for a huge portion of these preparations, which is looked at as the fifth flattener. Offshoring, a sixth flattening force, is using the Chinese manufacturing sector as a prime example, has forced other developing countries to try to keep up with their low cost solutions, resulting in better quality and cheaper products being produced worldwide. The seventh flattening factor is our introduction to supply chaining, Rounding out his list are insourcing, in-forming and “the steroids”, Friedman examines his flattening factors, their origins and the effect they will have on the way we do business in the future. 

Chapter 2 of __The World Is Flat__ is very long, and provides countless examples to support his claim that certain forces have flattened the world over the past 20 years or so. I have chosen to take quotes and small paragraphs from each of the flattening forces, to give insight to the chapter without re-writing the book.

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive people of the Soviet Empire. But it actually did so much more. It tipped the balance of power across the world toward those advocating democratic, consensual, freemarket-oriented governance, and away from those advocating authoritarian rule with centrally planned economies. (Friedman, p. 49)
 * //Flattener #1: 11/9/89 - The New Age of Creativity: When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Went Up//**

The first IBM PC hit the markets in 1981. At the same time, many computer scientists around the world had started using these things called the Internet and email. The first version of the Windows operating system shipped in 1985, and the real breakthrough version that made PCs truly user-friendly – Windows 3.-0- shipped on May 22, 1990, only six months after the wall went down. In this same time period, some people other than scientists started to discover that if they bought a PC and a dial-up modem, they could connect their PCs to their telephones and send emails through private Internet service provider- like CompuServe and America Online. (Friedman, p. 52)

“The more established Windows became as the primary operating system”, added Craig J. Mundie, chief technology officer for Microsoft, “The more programmers went out and wrote applications for rich-world business tasks to put on their computers, so they could do lots of new and different business tasks, which started to enhance productivity even more.” Tens of millions of people around the world became programmers to make the PC do whatever they wanted in their own languages. Windows was eventually translated into thirty-eight languages. People were able to become familiar with the PC in their own languages.” (Friedman, pp. 53-54)


 * //Flattener #2: 8/9/95- The New Age of Connectivity: When the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public//**

Netscape was a huge flattener for several reasons. The Netscape browser not only brought the internet alive, but also made the internet accessible to everyone from five year olds to ninety five year olds. The more alive the internet became the more different people wanted to do different things on the Web. (Friedman, p. 65) “Once the PC-Windows revolution demonstrated to everyone the value of being able to distill information and manipulate it on computers and word processors, and once the browser brought the Internet alive and made Web pages sing and dances and display, everyone wanted everything digitized as much as possible so they could send it to someone else down the Internet pipes. Thus began the digitization revolution. Digitization is that magic process by which words, music, data, films, files, and pictures are turned into bits and bytes- combinations of 1s and 0s- that can be manipulated on a computer screen, stored on a microprocessor, or transmitted over satellites and fiber optic lines. It used to be the post office was where I went to send my mail, but once the Internet came alive, I wanted my mail digitized so I could email it. (Friedman, p. 65)

Photography used to be a cumbersome process involving film coated with silver dug up from mines halfway across the world. I used to take some pictures with my camera, and then bring the film to the drugstore to be sent off to a big plant somewhere for processing. But once the Internet made it possible to send pictures around the world, attached to or in emails, I didn’t want to use silver film anymore. I wanted to take pictures in the digital format, which could be uploaded, not developed. (And by the way, I didn’t want to be confined to using a camera to take them. I wanted to be able to use my cell phone to do it.”) I used to have to go to Barnes & Noble to buy and browse books, but once the Intent came alive, I wanted to browse for books digitally on Amzaon.com as well. I used to go to the library to do research, but now I wanted to do it digitally through Google or Yahoo!, not just by roaming the stacks. I used to buy a CD to listen to Simon and Garfunkel. CDs had already replaced albums as a form of digitized music- but once the Internet came alive, I wanted those music bites to be even more malleable and mobile. I wanted to be able to download them into an iPod. In recent years the digitization technology evolved so I could do just that. (Friedman, p 65)


 * //Flattener #3: Work Flow Software//**

“The vast network of underground plumbing that made it possible for all this work to flow has become quite extensive. It includes all the Internet protocols of the previous era, like TCP/IP and others, which made browsing, and email and Web sites possible. It includes new tools, like XML and SOAP, which enabled Web applications to communicate with each other more seamlessly, and it includes software agents known as middleware, which serves as an intermediary between wildly diverse applications. The nexus of these technologies has been a huge boon to innovation and a huge reducer of friction between companies and applications. Instead of everyone trying to control the fire hydrant nozzle, they made all the nozzles and hoses the same, creating a much bigger market that stretched across every neighborhood of the world. Then companies started to compete instead over the quality of the hose, the pump, and the fire truck. That is, they competed over who could make the most useful and nifty application. Said Joel Cawley, the head of IBM’s strategic planning unit,” Standards don’t eliminate innovation; they just allow you to focus it. They allow you to focus on where the real value lies, which is usually everything you can add above and around the standard.” (Friedman, p. 76)


 * //Flattener #4: Uploading, Harnessing the Power of Communities//**

“The vast network of underground plumbing that made it possible for all this work to flow has become quite extensive. It includes all the Internet protocols of the previous era, like TCP/IP and others, which made browsing, and email and Web sites possible. It includes new tools, like XML and SOAP, which enabled Web applications to communicate with each other more seamlessly, and it includes software agents known as middleware, which serves as an intermediary between wildly diverse applications. The nexus of these technologies has been a huge boon to innovation and a huge reducer of friction between companies and applications. Instead of everyone trying to control the fire hydrant nozzle, they made all the nozzles and hoses the same, creating a much bigger market that stretched across every neighborhood of the world. Then companies started to compete instead over the quality of the hose, the pump, and the fire truck. That is, they competed over who could make the most useful and nifty application. Said Joel Cawley, the head of IBM’s strategic planning unit,” Standards don’t eliminate innovation; they just allow you to focus it. They allow you to focus on where the real value lies, which is usually everything you can add above and around the standard.” (Friedman, p. 76)
 * //Flattener #5: Outsourcing Y2K//**

This computer remediation work was a vague, tedious job. Who in the world had enough software engineers to do it all? Answer: India, with all the techies from all those IITs and private technical colleges and computer schools. And with Y2K bearing down on us, America and India started dating, and that relationship became a huge flattener, because it demonstrated to so many different businesses that the combination of the PC, the Internet, and fiber-optic cable had created the possibility of a whole new form of collaboration and horizontal value creation: outsourcing. Any service call center, business support operation, or knowledge work that could be digitized could be sourced globally to the cheapest, smartest, or most efficient provider. Using fiber-optic cable connected workstations; Indian techies could get under the hood of your company’s computers and do all the adjustments, even though they were located halfway around the world. “[Y2K upgrading] was tedious work that was not going to give them an enormous competitive advantage,” said Vivek Paul, the Wipro executive whose company did some outsourced Y2K drudge work. “So all these Western companies were incredibly challenged to find someone else who would do it and do it for as little money as possible. They said, “We just want to get past the damn year 2001.’ So they started to work with Indian [technology] companies who they might not have worked with otherwise. (Friedman, p. 109)


 * //Flattener #6: Offshoring Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions//**

China’s real long-term strategy is to outrace American and the E.U. countries to the top, and the Chinese are off to a good start. China’s leaders are much more focused than many of their Western counterparts on how to train their young people in the math, science, and computer skills required for success in the flat worlds, how to build a physical and telecom infrastructure that will allow Chinese people to plug and play faster and easier than others, and how to create incentives that will attract global investors. What China’s leaders really want is the next generation of underwear or airplane wings to be //designed// in China as well. That is where things are heading in another decade. So in thirty years we will have gone from “sold in China” to “made in China” to “designed in China” to “dreamed up in China” – or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufactured on nothing to China as a low cost, high quality, hyper efficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on //everything//. This should allow China to maintain its role as a major flattening force, provided that political instability does not disrupt the process. (Friedman, p.119)


 * //Flattener #7: Supply - Chaining Eating Sushi in Arkansas//**

Just one company, Hewlett-Packard, will sell four hundred thousand computers through the four thousand Wal-Mart stores worldwide in one day during the Christmas season, which will require HP to adjust its supply chain, to make sure that all of its standards interface with Wal-Mart’s, so that these computers flow smoothly into the Wal- Mart river, into Wal-Mart streams, into the Wal-Mart stores. Wal-Mart’s ability to bring off this symphony on a global scale moving 2.3 billion general merchandise cartons a year down its supply chain into its stores- has made it the most important example of the next great flattener I want to discuss, which I call supplychaining. Supply-chaining is a method of collaborating horizontally- among suppliers, retailers, and customers- to create value. Supply-chaining is both enabled by the flattening of the world and a hugely important flattener itself, because the more these supply chains, grow and proliferate, the more they force the adoption of common standards between companies (so that every line of every supply chain can interface with the next), the more they eliminate points of friction at borders, the more the efficiencies, of one company get adopted by the others, and the more they encourage global collaboration. (Friedman, p. 129)


 * //Flattener #8: What the Guys in Funny Brown Shorts Are Really Doing//**

UPS maintains a think tank, the Operations Research Division, in Timonium, Maryland, which works on supply-chain algorithms. This “school” of mathematics is called “package flow technology,” and it is designed to constantly map the deployment of UPS trucks, ships, airplanes, and sorting capabilities with that day’s flow of packages around the world. “Now we can make changes in our network in hours to adjust to changes in volume,” say UPS CEO Eskew. “How I optimize the total supply chain is the key to the math.” The sixty-person UPS team in Timonium made up largely of people with engineering and math degrees, including several Ph.D.’s. (Friedman, p.147)


 * //Flattener #9: In-Forming Google, Yahoo, MSN Web Search//**

Said Google co-founder Russian-born Sergey Brin, “If someone has broadband, dial-up, or access to an Internet cafe, whether a kid in Cambodia, the university professor, or me who runs this search engine, all have the same basic access to overall research information that anyone has. It is a total equalizer. This is very different than how I grew up. My best access was some library, and it did not have all that much stuff, and you either had to hope for a miracle or search for something very simple or something very recent.” When Google came a long, he added, suddenly that kid had “universal access” to the information in libraries all over the world. (Friedman, p.152)

Who does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it “in- forming.” Informing is the individual’s personal analog to open sourcing, outsourcing, in sourcing, supply-chaining, and off shoring. In- forming is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain- a supply chain of information, knowledge, and entertainment, without having to go to the library or the movie theater or through network television. In- forming is searching for knowledge. It is about seeking like-minded people and communities. Google’s phenomenal global popularity, which has spurred Yahoo! and Microsoft (through its new MSN search) also to make power searching and in- forming prominent features of their Web sites, show how hungry people are for this form of collaboration. Google is now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago. (Friedman, p. 153)


 * //Flattener #10: The Steroids DIgital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual//**

For instance, MIPS stands for “millions of instructions per second,” and it is one measures of the computational capability of a computer’s microchips. In 1971, the Intel 4004 microprocessor produced .06 MIPS, or 60,000 instructions per second. Today’s Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition has a theoretical maximum of 10.8 billion instructions per second. In 1967, the Intel 4004 microprocessor contained 2,300 transistors. Today’s Titanium 2 packs 410 million transistors. Meanwhile, inputting and outputting data have leaped ahead at a staggering rate. At the speeds that disk drives operated back in the early days of 286 and 386 chips, it would have taken about a minute to download a single photo from my latest digital camera. Today I can do that in less than a second on a USB 2.0 disk drive and a Pentium processor. The amount of stuff you can now store to input and output “is off the charts, thanks to the steady advances in storage devices, “said Craig Mundie. “Storage is growing exponentially, and this is really as much a factor in the revolution as anything else.” It’s what is allowing all forms of content to become digital and to some extent portable. It is also becoming cheap enough that you can put massive amounts on even the personal devices people carry around with them. Five years ago, no one would have believed that you would be able to sell iPods with 40 gigabytes of storage, capable of holding thousands of songs, for prices that teenagers could afford. Now it’s seen as ho-hum. (Friedman, p. 163)

Friedman, T. (2007) //The World Is Flat//. New York: Picador/Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.