The World is Flat

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat org>
Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2005 11:01:37 -0600 (MDT)
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: For IP: The World is Flat

It's a Flat World After All

By Thomas L. Friedman

Published: April 3, 2005 in The New York Times

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the
Nina,
the Pinta and the Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the
people he met "Indians" and came home and reported to his king and queen:
"The world is round." I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just which
direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I
came
home and reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: "The world is
flat."
 
And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally
reshaping our lives -- much, much more quickly than many people realize. It
all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on
9/11,
the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to wonder whether
globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why
it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because
others
already are, and there is no time to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening
of
the world quite by accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was
visiting the Indian high-tech capital, Bangalore, working on a documentary
for
the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I interviewed
Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my
X-rays from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new
software from Bangalore. The longer I was there, the more upset I became --
upset at the realization that while I had been off covering the 9/11 wars,
globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess
the
eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of
the crown jewels of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan
Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was showing me his global video-conference
room,
pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV, which he said was the
biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the
key players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time
on
that supersize screen. So its American designers could be on the screen
speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers
all
at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above
the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys
workday: 24/7/365. The clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T.,
India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

"Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing
happening
today in the world," Nilekani explained. "What happened over the last years
is
that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble
era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband
connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things." At the
same
time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world,
and
there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and

<snip>

"What Nandan is saying," I thought, "is that the playing field is being
flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"

Continued at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?&pagewanted=all


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