10 forces that flattened the world

(My crappy notes on Thomas L. Friedman lecture linked in the last post)

4 triggers of the flat world (and collaboration)

• 11/9/89 – The fall of the Berlin Wall – allowed conversations to open up.
• 08/9/95 – Netscape went public – 1) Netscape Navigator brought the Internet alive, everyone could use it 2) Netscape commercialised a set of open standards to ensure the interoperability of the Internet removing any walled gardens 3) they triggered the dot com boom, triggering over $ 1 trillion dollars accidental investment in fibre optic cable.
• Work flow – Applications being able to talk to each other gave us a global platform for collaborating on stuff. People are able to work o stuff like never before

Other expressions of collaboration

• Outsourcing – Really took off around y2k
• Off-shoring – When China joined World Trade Organisation
• Open sourcing – As a verb
• Supply Chaining – A la Wall Mart, as a complete science.
• In-Sourcing – What UPS does, they don’t just deliver packages, they do internal logistics “your world synchronised”
• Informing – Google – I can inform myself, i can collaborate with data all by myself

What’s the 10th?

• ‘The Steroids’ – Wireless, Voice of Internet, File Sharing – These turbo charge all of the above, anywhere on any device