Summary
One: While I Was Sleeping
Christopher Columbus, of oceans blue and 1492, thought he could find a better passage to India. Spain wanted in on the spice trade, so they funded his voyage. It was lucky, then, that he reached land before running out of food and water. He declared the natives âIndiansâ and proved that the world was round, despite some sketchy cartography.
In the present day, Indians of a very different kind greet Westernersâin the form of companies like IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments, as well as consumers in need of a helping tech handâthrough phone lines and fiber-optic networks created at great expense and sold cheaply in the early 2000s. These Indians are the first of many people freed from the accident of geography. They handle the work that Americans used to doâin fields ranging from accounting to radiology to journalism to tutoring kids. Whatever work can be digitized and outsourced, will beâeven if only a portion of the process is sent to India (or Australia, China, or anyplace else where itâs daytime during the American nighttime). Friedman uses the example of making dinner plans: Sure, you need cooks and waiters in the United States, but someone in Bangalore can easily take your reservation, assign you a table, and store your contact information.
The reason is simple: Indian workers can be paid less than American workers. In India, there is an entire system set up to hire and train call center employeesâincluding classes on how to develop an American accent. The people seeking these jobs are educated and upwardly mobile, the type of Indians who mightâve immigrated to the United States in the past, seeking advancement. Now, they can have a successful American job without having to leave their families and culture.
Itâs not just America, either. Friedman discusses Japan outsourcing jobs to China, an odd concept for historical enemies. Chinese workers donât seem bothered by the old animosity, thoughâtheyâre focused on the bottom line. Their plan is to earn money and learn the newest technology and business ⌠so that eventually they can stop working for American and Japanese firms and start their own.
Outsourcing isnât the only kind of sourcing. JetBlue uses home workers in Utah to handle reservations. McDonaldâs has people in other states taking drive-through orders. The military flies drones in Iraq from a base in Nevada.
The virtual, collaborative community we call âthe worldâ is flat.
Need to Know: Opportunity costs fell so massively in the decade between the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the events of 9/11 that we might as well call it a new era of discovery, a world gone from round to flat. Friedman believes that this is a watershed development in history, akin to the Industrial Revolution.
Two: The Ten Forces That Flattened the World
Friedman believes that ten flatteners led to our current era of globalization:
- The Berlin Wall fell, enabling millions of people to join in the world economy in a new way. Around the same time, Microsoft Windows was created, giving all people, everywhere, the ability to create content on their own.
- Tim Berners-Lee and others developed the World Wide Web, allowing people to use the Internet to share information. With the addition of Netscape, a browser that let different systems interoperate, the threat of proprietary standards ebbed. People using any type of computer were able to access the Web. This led to the dot-com bubble, and to massive investment in fiber-optic cable, optimistically laid to handle infinitely growing traffic.
- Work flow software was developed, breaking tasks into smaller pieces using an alphabet soup of standardsâTCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, XML, AJAXâto hand to teams around the world. This enabled work to happen at all hours of the day. It also broke internal business departments out of their specialized silos.
- Communities began forming online, with people uploading and sharing content and new creations without specialized support. This allowed the technical-minded to gel into their own groups of free-software developers, c...
