The World is Flat A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

1. The World is FlatA Brief History of the Twenty-First Century Thomas L. Friedman Group #3 Jenna Doran Ben Fraley

2. How the World Became FlatChapter Two: The Ten Forces That Flattened the World Flattener # 4: Uploading Flattener # 5: Outsourcing Flattener # 6: Offshoring

3. Flattener #4: UploadingHarnessing the Power of Communities • Community Developed Software • Blogging / Podcasting • Wikipedia • How Far Can Uploading Go?

4. Community Developed Software • Collaborative work on computer code to create a completely free software program • Apache- a web server program, was one of the first community developed programs • Companies like IBM sell programs that will work on top of Apache, but Apache itself remains free.

5. Examples ofCommunity Developed Software Mozilla Firefox Linux Operating System The GIMP Photo Editing

6. Opposition • “Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates, is convinced that the future of software is not in free. ‘You need capitalism [to drive innovation]. To have [a movement] that says innovation does not deserve an economic reward is contrary to where the world is going.’” (110)

7. Blogging / Podcasting • Blogging is becoming bigger all the time • 24 million at the time WIF was published, in 2006 (118) • Worldwide, ~200 million January 2008 (link) • Grows about 70,000 blogs a day

8. Wikipedia • Online user-edited encyclopedia • Friedman did a lot of his research using Wikipedia • Enormous collection of human knowledge • Encarta Standard: 36,000 articles • Wikipedia: 2,225,362 articles as of yesterday at 4PM

9. How Far Can Uploading Go? “ …everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a Weblog, and code a program…What happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download?” (96)

10. Flattener #5: Outsourcing • The Y2K “crisis” • Who would go through all the code to save all the computers? • This code work was outsourced to India, the first wide-scale computer project outsourced to India • They did such a good, quick, and efficient job that companies began to outsource more and more jobs

11. Effect of Outsourcing • After the “technology bubble” burst, companies were left with lowered prices and sales, but with the same running and operations costs • Companies were able to save themselves by outsourcing a lot of work to India, lowering costs • Both good and bad: • Some lower level American jobs were lost • Many more were saved by keeping whole companies from bankrupting and firing all their workers

12. Flattener #6: OffshoringRunning with Gazelles, Eating with Lions “If Americans and Europeans want to benefit from the flattening of the world and the interconnecting of all the markets and knowledge centers, they will have to run as least as fast as the fastest lion–and I suspect that lion will be China, and I suspect that will be pretty darn fast.” (151)

13. Offshoring is NOT Outsourcing • Outsourcing is moving administrative, operations, and other data or work to another country to save costs • Offshoring is sending manufacturing and/or assembly functions overseas to save business costs • Has been in practice for much longer • Companies save money on labor costs, and countries also offer huge tax breaks in order to attract companies

14. Made in China • In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization • Companies now can now more easily enter into the 1 billion person Chinese market • China will become a huge part of the worldwide economy in our lifetime, possibly the focal point • “The China Price”- Question #3: Is it ethical to offshore to China, considering their communist regime, lax labor laws, and low workplace standards?