The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century is an international bestselling book by Thomas Friedman that analyzes

globalization, primarily in the early 21st century. The title is a metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce, where all competitors have an equal opportunity. As the first edition cover illustration indicates, the title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The book was first released in 2005, was later released as an "updated and expanded" edition in 2006, and yet again released with additional updates in 2007 as "further updated and expanded: Release 3.0." The title was derived from a statement by Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of Infosys. The World is Flat won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2005.

Contents

1 Summary o 1.1 Ten flatteners o 1.2 Proposed remedies 2 Reception 3 Editions 4 See also 5 References 6 External links o 6.1 Reviews

Summary
In his book, The World is Flat, Friedman recounts a journey to Bangalore, India, when he realized globalization has changed core economic concepts.[1] In his opinion, this flattening is a product of a convergence of personal computer with fiber-optic micro cable with the rise of work flow software. He termed this period as Globalization 3.0, differentiating this period from the previous Globalization 1.0 (in which countries and governments were the main protagonists) and the Globalization 2.0 (in which multinational companies led the way in driving global integration). Friedman recounts many examples of companies based in India and China that, by providing labor from typists and call center operators to accountants and computer programmers, have become integral parts of complex global supply chains for companies such as Dell, AOL, and Microsoft. Friedman's Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention is discussed in the book's penultimate chapter.

Friedman repeatedly uses lists as an organizational device to communicate key concepts, usually numbered, and often with a provocative label. Two example lists are the ten forces that flattened the world, and three points of convergence.

Ten flatteners
Friedman defines ten "flatteners" that he sees as leveling the global playing field:

#1: Collapse of the Berlin Wall 11/9/89: Friedman called the flattener, "When the walls came down, and the windows came up." The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold War, it allowed people from the other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. "11/9/89" is a discussion about the Berlin Wall coming down, the "fall" of communism, and the impact that Windows powered PCs (personal computers) had on the ability of individuals to create their own content and connect to one another. At that point, the basic platform for the revolution to follow was created: IBM PC, Windows, a standardized graphical interface for word processing, dial-up modems, a standardized tool for communication, and a global phone network. #2: Netscape 8/9/95: Netscape went public at the price of $28. Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by "early adopters and geeks" to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year-olds. The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music, and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world. #3: Workflow software: Friedman's catch-all for the standards and technologies that allowed work to flow. The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved, as stated by Friedman. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a "crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration." There was an emergence of software protocols (SMTP simple mail transfer protocol; HTML the language that enabled anyone to design and publish documents that could be transmitted to and read on any computer anywhere) Standards on Standards. This is what Friedman called the "Genesis moment of the flat world." The net result "is that people can work with other people on more stuff than ever before." This created a global platform for multiple forms of collaboration. The next six flatteners sprung from this platform. #4: Uploading: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon "the most disruptive force of all." #5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way. This process became easier with the mass distribution of fiber optic cables during the introduction of the World Wide Web. #6: Offshoring: The internal relocation of a company's manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land to take advantage of less costly operations there. China's entrance in the WTO (World Trade Organization) allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businesses offshore to them.

#7: Supply-chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping. #8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company's employees perform services beyond shipping for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees. #9: Informing: Google and other search engines are the prime example. "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people on their own had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people," writes Friedman. The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman states that it is "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago." #10: "The Steroids": Wireless, Voice over Internet, and file sharing. Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual all analog content and processes (from entertainment to photography to word processing) can be digitized and therefore shaped, manipulated and transmitted; virtual these processes can be done at high speed with total ease; mobile can be done anywhere, anytime by anyone; and personal can be done by you.

Proposed remedies
Thomas Friedman believes that to fight the quiet crisis of a flattening world, the United States work force should keep updating its work skills. Making the work force more adaptable, Friedman argues, will keep it more employable. He also suggests that the government make it easier to switch jobs by making retirement benefits and health insurance less dependent on one's employer and by providing insurance that would partly cover a possible drop in income when changing jobs. Friedman also believes there should be more inspiration for youth to be scientists, engineers, and mathematicians due to a decrease in the percentage of these professionals being American.

Reception
In a 2007 Foreign Policy magazine article, Harvard Business School Professor Pankaj Ghemawat argued that 90% of the world's phone calls, Web traffic, and investments are local, suggesting that Friedman has grossly exaggerated the significance of the trends he describes: "Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists."[2][3] The book is perceived to be written from an American perspective. Friedman's work history has been mostly with The New York Times and this may have influenced the way in which the book was written some would have preferred a book written in a more "inclusive voice".[4]

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has also been critical of Friedman's book. In Making Globalization Work, Stiglitz writes: Friedman is right that there have been dramatic changes in the global economy, in the global landscape; in some directions, the world is much flatter than it has ever been, with those in various parts of the world being more connected than they have ever been, but the world is not flat [] Not only is the world not flat: in many ways it has been getting less flat. Richard Florida expresses similar views in his 2005 Atlantic article "The World is Spiky".[5] Matt Taibbi of the New York Press wrote a scathing review, saying that "On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leghumping that passes for thought in this country", adding: "Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is how sure you sound when you say it. And that's basically what he's doing here. The internet is speeding up business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than ever. Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical gist of The World Is Flat. It's brilliant." Taibbi also takes issue with the title, noting that "The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world." He concludes, "473 pages of this, folks... Is there no God?"

The Dot-Com "boom" started roughly around 1996 or 1997, though it was on the uptick since 1994

The "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering roughly 19972001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw their value increase rapidly from growth in the new Internet sector and related fields. The period was marked by the founding (and in many cases, spectacular failure) of a group of new Internet-based companies commonly referred to as dot-coms. A combination of rapidly increasing stock prices, individual speculation in stocks, and widely available venture capital created an exuberant environment in which many of these businesses dismissed standard business models, focusing on increasing market share at the expense of the bottom line. The bursting of the dot-com bubble marked the beginning of a relatively mild yet rather lengthy recession in Western nations. In 1994 the Internet came to the general public's attention with the public advent of the Mosaic Web browser and the nascent World Wide Web, and by 1996 it became obvious to most publicly

traded companies that a public Web presence was desirable. Though at first people saw mainly the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (which came to be called e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. These concepts in turn intrigued many bright, young, often underemployed people (many of the so-called Generation X), who realized that new business models would soon arise based on these possibilities and wanted to be among the first to profit from these new models. The suddenly low price of reaching millions worldwide, and the possibility of selling to or hearing from those people at the same moment when they were reached, promised to overturn established business dogma in advertising, mail-order sales, customer relationship management, and many more areas. The idea that the Web could bring together unrelated buyers and sellers, or advertisers and clients, in seamless and low-cost ways was a commonly held belief; it was soon to be proven to be very complex and expensive to develop a business on this model, only a few would eventually succeed. A study by the US Department of Commerce found that internet traffic was doubling every one hundred days, and extrapolated the trend to predict that internet commerce would be a 300 billion dollar sector by 2002. Early in the bubble years, three major technology groups benefitted most from the building excitement of what the Internet had to offer. These were: Internet and network infrastructure (e.g. WorldCom, larger than MCI in August 1996), Internet tools (e.g. Netscape, IPO August 1995), and Internet-direct consumer websites (e.g. Yahoo!, IPO April 1996). The venture capitalists saw record-setting rises in stock valuation of these and other similar companies, and therefore moved faster and with less caution than usual, choosing to hedge the risk by starting many contenders and letting the market decide which would succeed. The low interest rates in 199899 helped increase the start-up capital amounts. Although a number of these new entrepreneurs had realistic plans and administrative ability, most of them lacked these characteristics but were able to sell their ideas to investors because of the novelty of the dot-com concept. A canonical "dot-com" company's business model relied on harnessing network effects by giving products away to build market share (or mind share). These companies expected that by operating at a loss they could build enough brand awareness to charge for their services later. (Yahoo! and a few other successful survivors of the era actually succeeded with this strategy.) Many raised cash through public offerings on the stock exchanges, with stock often soaring to dizzying heights and making the initial controllers of the company wildly rich on paper (aka. stock options). Dot-com companies were stereotyped as having extremely young and inexperienced managers wearing polo shirts with lavish offices including foosball, free food and soft drinks as well as iconic Aeron chairs. Companies frequently held parties or expositions where free pens, T-shirts, stress balls, and other trinkets emblazoned with the company's logo were given away. The companies were also stereotyped as requiring extremely long work hours and high pressure. An annual event started in 1995, the Webby Awards, working to recognize the best websites on the Internet. The event was typically an extravaganza held annually in San Francisco, California,

near the heart of Silicon Valley. The ceremonies mirrored the flashy dot-com lifestyle with costumed guests, modern dancers, and faux-paparazzi to make guests feel important. The event peaked in 2001 with thousands in attendance. In 2002 it was a more somber event with only several hundred guests and little of the excess of the late 1990s. In 2003 the awards were reduced to a virtual event because many of the nominees could not fly to San Francisco due primarily to corporate belt-tightening and fear of losing their jobs. The 2005 and 2006 editions were held in New York City. Historically, the dot-com boom can be seen as similar to a number of other technology-inspired booms of the past including railroads in the 1840s, automobiles and radio in the 1920s, transistor electronics in the 1950s, computer time-sharing in the 1960s, and home computers and biotechnology in the early 1980s.