In this next section of the book Freidman describes his 10 reasons that the world is flattened. The first flattener he attributes to is the falling of the Berlin Wall. He sees the wall as a roadblock in connecting the world and that the wall separated the communist from the capitalists. As the wall falls down this opens up the roadways and ground routes for the information highway to expand. This now takes the world from being to separate spheres and turns it into a whole body reaching toward a connection. The next flattener he mentions is the invention of the WWW and Netscape. He sees the World Wide Web as a great innovation but something that was not easily operable by the common person. It wasn’t until Netscape came along and made the internet more user friendly that people started to latch onto it and it began to grow. This invention allowed anyone and everyone to put their opinions and ideas on the internet for anyone and everyone to see. This flattened the world because people could now pass information easier than ever. This, though, was only the beginning. The next flattener is the invention of work flow software and its effect on the internet. It created a commonality of standards that made it easier to pass information to one another. The standards allowed companies to change their focus from making their product singular to opening up the power of their products because quality was now more important due to the playing field being so very similar. The fourth flattener deals with the topic of uploading the reasons for it flattening the world. This trend allowed everyone to be producers of software and information rather than just consumers. It left people striving to develop new and advanced things and leveled out the world. Not only were the technology companies developing software and websites but now the simple user could develop his or her own sites/software that they could upload to the internet for other users to see and operate. Freidman brings up the topic of community developed software which commonly gets the name open source community. This is fairly complicated to understand but it is generally just the programming instructions that make the software run. This offered competition to the major corporations to always produce the best quality software but also to provide it at a reasonable price. Friedman lays the most room for more flattening if that makes sense on uploading. It has the most room to succeed or be disruptive. Things such as blogging and Wikipedia are often user opinion and even in our course of research Wikipedia cannot be trusted but I feel like it kind of goes along with what Dr. Goates said in class about the theory of multiple people laying out information will be right in the long run. I see how uploading can turn bad, but I feel as if with the proper education and adoption and simple overlooking ethics we can keep uploading a positive thing for people to do. Flattener number five is outsourcing. Outsourcing has flattened our world because business people see that they can make more profits by taking the less challenging work to cheaper labor countries. This in turn provides and opportunity for that country to become more educated and therefore increase their stance in the global economy. Look at India and how they have developed and China too. These countries are and will overtake the US and Europe because of their rapid increase in education. By outsourcing labor positions elsewhere we have flattened the world because with the opportunity to learn comes an economic boost. The next flattener is off shoring which is different from outsourcing because it isn’t just contracting out a single part of your business it is actually taking your whole business elsewhere. He contributes the flattening that has occurred from this to the entrance of China to the WTO. Ever since then every other country has had to work faster and faster to keep up with the development that China was seeing. The scary thing is that China just isn’t cheaper from the labor standpoint but their innovation and technologies have seen steady improvements over the past decade or so which is something the US and Europe need to be aware of. The seventh flattener deals with supply chaining and how that has flattened the world. The reason that this is such a flattener is because when a company takes advantage of a supplier on a global level they are interconnecting the world in a way that hasn’t been seen before. The goal of low cost makes this so important because companies are now looking anywhere they can in order to get a better deal than their competitor thus creating a flattened world. Flatteners eight and nine are insourcing and informing. These both go a long way as to making the world a flatter place. As far as insourcing goes the leader here is UPS. They have gone from merely delivering packages to now setting up complete supply chain systems for companies all over the world and bringing together companies all across the world like never before. UPS helps small companies broaden their reach because UPS has the means to deliver and receive from anywhere and everywhere. I find this fascinating because it allows the world to flatten more and more due to an ever increasing number of companies reaching globally thanks to UPS’s help. Informing relates to Google and Yahoo mainly. The two major search engines, they allow anyone with internet access the ability to find anything they’re looking for by simply typing it into the box. This has flattened the world mainly because so much information is readily accessible whenever wherever by whoever. The last flattener is simply the new advances and the shrinking and accessibility of the technology. Inventions such as the sd card, iphone, tablet, laptop, etc. have all provided more access to the information available on the internet. The fact that everything I need is available on my smart phone makes all the difference. For the world to be flat the accessibility has to be there and this is the recent push we have seen between competitors today.
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