The Ten Forces That Flattened the World

1. The Ten Forces That Flattened the World Chapter 2

2. #1 – The New Age of Creativity: When the Walls Came Down and the Windows Came Up • odd things to think about • arguably the greatest beneficiaries of Windows are those who have no/poor English skills or speak English as a non-native language • where would the US economy be today is the Berlin wall stood another 20 years, i.e. to 2009

3. What does the Nehru approach to economics in India tell us? • 1991, the “Berlin Wall” of India fell • abolished most trade • market rate of growth became acceptable • without governmental barriers, trade can be a “flat” transaction • “wall down” === “common standards” and maybe common expectations

4. What does Friedman say was the ‘first among equals’ cause of the Berlin Wall’s falling? Friedman would say information – information through technology such as fax machines, mobile telephones, and PCs. I agree.

5. #2 – The New Age of Connectivity: When the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public • by the mid 1990s the “personal” in PCs needed to become connected to others • what is a “sneaker net?”

6. who is driving the control of the WWW? • technical protocols, language standards, operational planning • government, industry, professional organizations, non-governmental organizations, individuals what about persons that get to use the tools that only governments can afford, then turn around and privatize their discoveries?

7. world wide web is content • internet is the medium once more – revolutions of the spoken word, written word, printed word, and computer-manipulated word

8. A Misdirection on Netscape • it is important to dig in a little deeper when Friedman talks about the importance of Netscape on page 62, remember the part “Looking back, what enabled Netscape to take off was the existence , from an earlier phase, of millions of PCs, many equipped with modems. Those are the shoulders Netscape stood on.”

9. New Connections • if you have a connection, what is your stake in having others connect to you? • what are the limits to your ability to gain new users? • when would you try to limit new users?

10. Is E-Mail the Most Important Aspect of the Web/Internet? what is “e-mail”?

11. why is “free to educational institutions and non-profits” so important for software for connections?

12. what do you think about Gate’s comparison of the dot com bubble to a gold rush?

13. #3 – Work Flow Software • work flow that does not need to be sequential is most affected by this flattener • book uses the example of making an animation production, what are other examples?

14. “simple mail transfer protocol” was a standardization that jump started this movement (not just what you could type, but what could be attached and in what format – Word, PDF, JPG, etc) • “transmission control protocol/Internet protocol” a.k.a. TCP/IP – just chunk it down the wire

15. standardization is the key to work flow productivity. Who makes the standardization? people? governments? companies? professional organizations? at what point does the tool begin to change what tasks are performed? http://www.salesforce.com/

16. #4 – Uploading: Harnessing the Power of Communities • it was a big deal when web users got to “talk back” – why? what is the implication of the consumer also becoming a content developer?

17. do you trust “open source?” blogs, wikis, independent news/commentaries? • why and/or why not? • a good quote in the book is “what happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download?” (page 95)

18. #5 – Outsourcing Y2K • what is the concept of the “second buyer?” • it was the Y2K problem (looming large in the last half of the 1990s and largely after the overabundance of fiber optics) • Y2K got US companies to look at India, the dot com boom got US businesses hooked, and when the bust occurred US jobs were more affected than Indian jobs

19. #6 – Offshoring: Running with Gazelles, Eating with Lions “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter if you are a lion or gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.” what does this quote tell us? about physical goods? about knowledge work?

20. #7 – Eating Sushi in Arkansas • supply chain madness • what is the role of IT in supply chain optimization? • how deep does IT have to be embedded in the country/region/town where the good is physically produced? the transportation manager wants to do business with the cheapest trucking company – the production manager wants to do business with the most reliable trucking company – these goals may be in conflict, how can IT help?

21. lean logistics is not a choice for any company, it is a necessity for survival

22. #8 Insourcing – What the Guys in the Funny Brown Shorts are Really Doing • how much of “insourcing” is just another facet of the logistics of outsourcing? • oddly stated, think of insourcing as moving the factory/producer close to the consumer instead of transporting the product over a long and/or expensive distance • how deep does IT have to be embedded in the logistics to have insourcing reach a tipping point of profitability?

23. #9 – In-Forming: Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search • how does a search for an estranged brother lead a woman to find love with a male prostitute in Mexico? • what do the most frequently searched words tell us about people who use the search engines? gender? age? political affiliation? affluence? social status? none of the above? all of the above?

24. when does data become information? • what is the role of knowing what to do with the information? • is the ability to use the searched data to accomplish a task more important than the collection and storage of the data?

25. what does Friedman mean when he talks about the searching potential of Google (and other engines) and admonishes us to “be good?”

26. #10 – The Steroids: Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual • the US is behind in the race/practice of wireless technology, especially phone/communication equipment – can the US catch up? • why or why not?

27. wireless communication (to people and/or IT) means connectivity • the US sells access – should access be free (or nominally priced) and content has a price?

28. I believe Friedman has made a basic mistake when he says computing is composed of 3 things; computational ability, storage capacity, and input/output capacity – computing is mainly about conceptualizing problem solutions in a structured manner that can be solved by “general” devices

29. #10 is fundamentally about connection, what happens if storage is so vast and cheap that “connection” is not necessary to receive content because it is encoded into a miniscule device you can carry?