ESSAY : THE WORLD IS FLAT

Has truly the world become flat? Isn’t this the theory what Christopher Columbus turn down as he discover America instead of India? In fact the world was flat by the XV century but them its turn to be round and though some historical events the world has become more a more flattened than ever. Most of us don’t imagine or realize when this happened and as the fully majority we don’t know how to act. During this Essay I will exposed how the world has become leveled and flattened and what were the events that marked the history of this flattening base on the Thomas Friedman´s book “The world is flat”.

How the World has turn Flattened and leveled are many historical and geographical journey, starting from the days of Columbus to a modern day Indian call center; from the Great Depression to the home office of a Midwestern-USA housewife demonstrating the pervasiveness of the world-flattening trend. This flattening trend is Spanning a broad range of industries, cultures and schools of though. Starting from teleconferencing, military operations to podcasts and manufacturing to restaurant order taking, the Flattening trend leaves no stone unturned in a quest for answers to a problem that most cannot even define.

During the last four hundred years the world has face 3 globalization eras. The first was with the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus which opened the commerce between the old world and the new world plus imperialism with knocked down certain barriers and promoted global integration, through their muscles, the horse, wind power and steam, that was the globalization 1.0, this turned the world from large to medium size.

Them the globalization 2.0 that start from the year 1800 until the 2000, this turned the world from medium to small size word. During those year’s form the world powers nations such as Holland, Germany and United Kingdom; started to emerge emerged companies that trough the time focus on promoting the industrial revolution worldwide. During the first industrial revolution the cost of transportation went down thanks to the steam engine and the railway. Then by the second part of the revolution cost of telecommunications went down due the invention of the telegraph , telephone , computers , satellites , fiber optics and the version of the internet, all this lead that people around the world could communicate faster, all the time and at a lower price.

Right away in the year 2000 the globalization 3.0 started, this was a non return point, this end up shrinking the world even more.  The world became from small to tiny due the competition and collaboration between companies and individuals that nowadays compete globally for the knowledge. During this last period of globalization the dominance made by the western countries has been threatened by various non-western people such as India and China which are working everyday to increase their power of automation, digitalization and virtualization which nowadays bring the mayor profits.

Those were roughly the three major’s stages that change the world. But during the last 30 years to now, there were many “flatteners” that increase, impulse and powered the globalization 3.0 to become the world tiny.  Those flatteners were the 11/9/89 , the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 8/9/95 , or the date that Netscape went public; work flow software; uploading; outsourcing; off shoring ; in-sourcing; in-forming; and the steroids.

During each flattener stage the world was getting closer and closer to the total flattening. The Berlin wall cause a total shoot down of the balance of power in the world, at that moment the world was being polarize between capitalism and communism. Due to the turn down of the wall the democracy gain the dispute and spread around the world as a consequence the world was guided to the orientation towards free trade and the perception of the world has a single market, a single unique ecosystem and as a community itself expanded.  This empowered people and cause the adoption of common standards, the communication grew horizontally and individual’s power was boosted.

Next flattener stage was the grow of internet. In fact during this period the world got interconnected and flattens like never before. In 1991 the first webpage to exchange information was created by scientists plus the development of e-mails helped people communicate faster than regular mail creating and whole new communication system through the network. Within those years many portals business were created but were impulse by Netscape with create a framework for internet web browser and exploited as the “dotcom bubble". This bubble helped the internet industry has an incredible development due to the high amount on money that went from the real sector to this dotcom sector; this made many companies invest excessive in fiber optics and offer services at very low cost providing the people with a lot of options. All this contribute to the flattening of the world.

Continuously the work flow software pushes forward the flattening process with the creation of the software all around the world such as buy and sell products, supervision of inventory, tax preparation software, and review of x –ray photos which impulse the higher use of computers advantage as higher speed of processing. Also the new transmission protocols ensure the effective interconnection between computers among different countries. In other words, this helped people talk the same language and design their software depends on their own need which in really helped the world flattened. 

Later on the flattener made by the uploading began.  The uploading feature allows individuals, communities, companies, universities and countries institutions to allocate information on the Web. This flat-world platform has allowed these individuals and communities to produce really complex things with much less time and money than before. As an example we can see how the community developed software, and uploading features such Wikipedia and blogging/ podcast to help people put on the web information about any topic the people has interested in. it’s important to highlight that uploading appeals to a basic human need to participate and be heard; thus, of the ten flatteners, uploading has the potential to be the most disruptive.  

Then to make things even more flattened the outsourcing concept comes around.  In this stage the lack of engineers in the USA push multinationals look in India the labor force they didn’t  have back home. All this companies benefited from India’s seven Institutes of Technology (IIT), created in 1951. These highly competitive schools located in India were subsidized by tax dollars; churn out highly-qualified, highly-skilled professionals in need of jobs.  The Y2K created jobs for Indian software engineers because a large number of techs were needed to remedy the millennium bug.  Moreover, the fiber optic boom, which occurred at the same time, allowed any “service, call center, business support operation, or knowledge work that could be digitized” to be outsourced. Thus, the dot-com bust resulted in jobs for Indians, who would work for less money than Americans and could perform the tasks in India because of their education as well as the technology of the PC, the Internet, and fiber optics.

To continue with the flattening process the off shoring, the supply chaining, in sourcing and informing and finally the steroids end up to be the no return point into this process. The off shoring process is when a company moves one of its factories to another country (not just a specific task, as with outsourcing) for various reasons, such as cheaper labor and resources, fewer trade barriers, and fewer taxes.  In fact when China joined the WTO in 2001 and accepted to comply with international law and standard business practices, therefore assuring investors that establishing factories in China would be financially beneficial the off shoring reached new heights. As an immediately consequence of the off shoring companies start to expand geographically and have to face new challenges such as how keep their stock of products available. This is the next flattener the supply chaining, which Friedman describes as “a method of collaborating horizontally—among suppliers, retailers, and customers—to create value.”  A clear example of how this flattened the world is the Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retail company, which makes nothing.  Wal-Mart is essentially a hyper-efficient supply chain.  For example, during the Christmas season, Hewlett-Packard sells four-hundred thousand computers each day through Wal-Mart’s four thousand stores. 

 Different form the outsourcing the in sourcing came to balance the scales. Suddenly when the world became flat, smalls companies that before couldn’t reach many markets could now suddenly see around the world.  Because most companies did not have the capacity or the desire to develop a supply chain as complex as Wal-Mart’s, they hired other companies to do it for them.  To explore this concept more concretely, Friedman considers UPS’s role in sourcing. A clear example is when a Toshiba laptop breaks while under warranty, the customer can drop the computer off at a UPS store to have it shipped to Toshiba.  But what actually happens is that UPS repairs the laptop in Louisville in a UPS workshop.  A few years ago, Toshiba was criticized for taking too long to repair broken computers, so Toshiba collaborated with UPS to make the process go faster.

At that point the world was turning flattened more a more every day, the speed of changes was overwhelming most of us. Suddenly the informing stage with the born of Google, Yahoo and MSN web search exploited and the search for knowledge was accessible for anyone anywhere at any time, now people has the resources to become your own self-directed and self-empowered researcher, editor, and selector of entertainment without having to go to the library or the movie theater or through network television.

Finally the last flattener came alive and it was the famous “steroids” which was the name Friedman calls certain technologies such as digital, mobile, personal, and virtual, because they augment and strengthen other flatteners. 

To conclude I would to bring up that  we have seen how each of this flatteners helps us to go deeper and deeper into what the author call “flattening the world” but I would like to see it  as the integration of the humanity like we did in the past Thousands of years before when the five continents where one. The technology is helping people interact and communicate faster and better between each other and making the process easier and cheaper.