The World Is Flat: Chapters 1–2

Groups can serve as support groups for complete strangers who are galvanized by a common issue (coping with rare diseases, first-time parents, spouses of active-duty personnel) or who seek others who share similar interests (hobbies as esoteric as dog-sledding, blackjack, and indoor tanning have large memberships).

It was during this era that we really saw the birth and maturation of a global economy, in the sense that there was enough movement of goods and information from continent to continent for there to be a global market, with global arbitrage in products and labor.

It should be read, if you can imagine this, in the voice of someone with an Indian accent trying to imitate an American or a Brit. Also imagine that no matter how rude, unhappy, irritated, or ornery the voices are on the other end of the line, these young Indians are incessantly and unfailingly polite.

On the surface, there is something unappealing about the idea of inducing other people to flatten their accents in order to compete in a flatter world.

But before you disparage it, you have to taste just how hungry these kids are to escape the lower end of the middle class and move up.

In the case of a merger, Brickwork will prepare those sections of the report dealing with general market conditions and trends, where most of the research can be gleaned off the Web and summarized in a standard format.

Chinese doing computer drawings for Japanese homes, nearly seventy years after a rapacious Japanese army occupied China, razing many homes in the process. Maybe there is hope for this flat world ...

With its wide boulevards, beautiful green spaces, and nexus of universities, technical colleges, and massive software park, Dalian would stand out in Silicon Valley.

Because of its proximity to Japan and Korea, each only about an hour away by air, its large number of Japanese speakers, its abundance of Internet bandwidth, and many parks and a world-class golf course (all of which appeal to knowledge workers), Dalian has become an attractive locus for Japanese outsourcing.

They were 30 percent more productive—they take 30 percent more bookings, by just being happier. They were more loyal and there was less attrition.

Not quite as sexy as an all-in-one phone/camera/recorder (which does exist), but a statement on the ubiquity and miniaturization of technology nonetheless.

Basically, I’d say that the barrier to entry to do journalism that requires portable, ad hoc recording equipment, is [now] about $100—$200 to $300 if you add a camera, $400 to $500 for a pretty nice recorder and a pretty nice camera.

Henceforth, more and more economies would be governed from the ground up, by the interests, demands, and aspirations of the people, rather than from the top down, by the interests of some narrow ruling clique.

The political constraint on individual reach collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall (though of course large swaths of repression still exist), and the practical constraint on individual reach collapsed with the rise of the Apple and Windows-enabled, modem-connected IBM PC.

When Andreessen was back at the University of Illinois NCSA lab, he found that he had PCs, workstations, and the basic network connectivity to move files around the Internet, but it was still not very exciting—because there was no simple, evocative user interface to pull up and display the contents of other people’s Web sites.

So, as Wikipedia recounts, Andreessen and a full-time salaried coworker, Eric Bina, started developing a user-friendly browser “with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers.

Andreessen was fastidious in monitoring and responding to all user comments for suggestions and improvements to the browser, which fueled its accessibility and its popularity.

“I am sure in Magellan’s time there were plenty of theologians, geographers, and pundits who wanted to make the world flat again. I know the world is flat, and thank you for your support.”

Standards don’t stop innovation, added Cawley, they just clear away a lot of extraneous stuff so you can focus on what really matters.

It is true we are going from a world where companies were independent systems, to a world where they became interconnected and interdependent systems, to a world where now companies large and small can assemble an inter-operable system of systems on their own just by going to the Business Web and renting or assembling whatever discrete programs they would like.

Sometimes a single egregious error is isolated and repeated over and over—a shaming strategy that has a certain heavy-handed and humiliating power.

Not wanting the content to languish, Wales placed the pages on a wiki Web site in January 2001 and invited any Internet visitors to edit or add to the collection.

As a result, articles on contentious issues such as globalization have benefited from the cooperative and global nature of Wikipedia.

It was mind-boggling when my son, John Seigenthaler, journalist with NBC News, phoned later to say he found the same scurrilous text on Reference.com and Answers.com.

There are also still deeply ingrained habits of deference to authority and institutions.

This was an important breakthrough for companies, because if you could safely, legally, and securely transcribe from Bangalore medical records, lab reports, and doctors’ diagnoses—in one of the most litigious industries in the world—a lot of other industries could think about sending some of their backroom work to be done in India as well.

“[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.

To use my parlance, they were ready to go on a blind date with India.

One of the great mistakes made by many analysts in the early 2000s was conflating the dot-com boom with globalization, suggesting that both were just fads and hot air.

Once America and India were dating, the burgeoning Indian IT companies in Bangalore started coming up with their own proposals.

Think about how many new products, ideas, jobs, and consumers arose from Western Europe’s and Japan’s efforts to become free-market democracies after World War II. The process unleashed an unprecedented period of global prosperity—and the world wasn’t even flat then.

Both challenges are exacerbated by the short life cycle of products today, particularly fashion and consumer electronics products.

But as workers, we are sometimes ambivalent or hostile to these supply chains, because they expose us to higher and higher pressures to compete, and force our companies to cut costs, and also, at times, cut our wages and benefits.

It is hard to exaggerate how isolated Bentonville, Arkansas, is from the currents of global debate on labor and human rights, and it is easy to see how this insular company, obsessed with lowering prices, could have gone over the edge in some of its practices.

Japanese discounters and department stores all have grocery sections, and they all carry fish for very discriminating Japanese consumers.

Turns out that while I was sleeping, stodgy old UPS became a huge force flattening the world.

But behind that innocuous facade, the company founded in Seattle in 1907 as a messenger service has reinvented itself as a dynamic supply-chain manager.

They are asking us to take them global. We help these companies achieve parity with the bigger guys.

You don’t have to make an appointment with a TV channel at the time and place someone else sets and watch the commercials foisted on you.

Guess what was the most rewound moment in TV history? Answer: Janet Jackson's breast exposure, or, as it was euphemistically called, her “wardrobe malfunction,” at the 2004 Super Bowl.