In this blog post, I would like to talk about the four “flatteners” Thomas L. Friedman discussed in his book “The World Is Flat.”

·         Supply-Chaining:  Friedman makes a comparison between the modern retail supply chain and a river. He gives us his best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping, which is Wal-Mart

·         Insourcing: “FedEx and UPS not just delivering packages anymore. They are synchronizing global supply chains large and small.”  Insourcing is when a company's employees perform services – “beyond shipping” – for another company.  Friedman uses UPS as the prime example.

·         In-Forming:  Yahoo, MSN Web Search, and mainly Google are examples of In-Forming. However, Friedman uses Google as the prime example.  As he says, "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago". Now people can get answers for any question they have in the world by simply writing it in Google search engine. From the creation of Goggle it has become possible and very easy to find so much information about so many things.

·         The Steroids: steroids are Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Besides the ten flatteners, Friedman gives "the triple convergence," three additional components that acted on the flatteners to create a new, flatter global playing field.

1.     Before 2000, the ten flatteners were semiautonomous from one another. However, around the year 2000, all the flatteners met in a point.  Each flattener improved the other flatteners; “the more one flattener developed, the more leveled the global playing field became.”

2.     After the appearance of the ten flatteners, businesses needed to collaborate horizontally instead of vertically, which means companies and people team up with other departments or companies to adjoin value creation or innovation.

3.     After the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries with Soviet economic model, such as India, China, Russia, and the nations of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia, started opening up their economies to the world. This enhanced horizontal collaboration. Friedman names the Convergence III as the most effective factor of determining politics and economics in the early 21st century.

In this blog post, I would like to talk about three of the ten “flatteners" Thomas L. Friedman discussed in his book “The World Is Flat”.

1.      Uploading is the third “flatteners" in his book. He thinks of it as "the most disruptive force of all."  Examples of uploading are open source software, Wikipedia, and blogs.

2.      Outsourcing is the fifth “flattener” in his book.  Friedman argues that outsourcing has permitted companies to divide service and manufacturing activities into parts that can be “subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way.”  Also, this became easier with the invention of World Wide Web

3.      Offshoring is the sixth flattener Friedman discusses. By offshoring, he means moving the interior company to other parts of the world.  For example, China goes in the World Trade Organization, and companies in United States go in job in China. 

In the last presentation for IT class, my group did something good or right and some other things wrong.  The first bad thing we did was that one of my team members was standing in front of the screen which blocked the audience from seeing the staff on the screen.  Second, the same member was very hesitant and so nervous that he couldn’t explain the staff he was responsible for well. His pronunciation was very bad. Also, we didn’t have the final draft of the presentation document. We played a rough draft which had many mistakes and less information.

My team did two things very good. First, we presented enough information, or a lot of information, about the topic. Second, we were able to answer to answer all of the audience’s questions correctly.

My team members and I should do several things for the next information. First, we all should work with our pronunciations and how stand, or in other word, how we act.  Also, we should make sure that we have the right data so that we will present everything we want.

The writer, Thomas L. Friedman by the word “Flatteners” mean that nothing can be separated from each other because everything in the world is interconnected with each other through technology.

1.      The Collapse of Berlin Wall: on 11/09/1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. In Friedman’s opinion, this event changed the world. He considers it a symbol as a general global shift toward democratic governments and free-market economies. After this, India changed its economy from a centrally planned economy to a free market economy.  Also after six months, Microsoft published Windows 3.0 which popularized personal computing.

2.      Netscape:  it was 8/9/1995 when World Wide Web was created. Before that, using the Internet required considerable computer expertise.  In the early 1990s, a scientist created named Tim Berners-Lee created a programming language for writing WebPages. It allowed users to store and share things. Netscape was available for every operating system like Microsoft, Apple and UNIX.

3.      Work Flow Software: Work flow software is software that enables workers in different locations to work together efficiently. Friedman gives the popular children’s program Higglytown Heroes as an example. The writers work at home different places far from each other.

I cannot imagine how our life would be now if these changes didn’t happen completely agree with the idea. I think it shifted our daily life. Now we can do things much easier and faster

The writer, Thomas L. Friedman by the word “Flatteners” mean that nothing can be separated from each other because everything in the world is interconnected with each other through technology.

1.      The Collapse of Berlin Wall: on 11/09/1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. In Friedman’s opinion, this event changed the world. He considers it a symbol as a general global shift toward democratic governments and free-market economies. After this, India changed its economy from a centrally planned economy to a free market economy.  Also after six months, Microsoft published Windows 3.0 which popularized personal computing.

2.      Netscape:  it was 8/9/1995 when World Wide Web was created. Before that, using the Internet required considerable computer expertise.  In the early 1990s, a scientist created named Tim Berners-Lee created a programming language for writing WebPages. It allowed users to store and share things. Netscape was available for every operating system like Microsoft, Apple and UNIX.

3.      Work Flow Software: Work flow software is software that enables workers in different locations to work together efficiently. Friedman gives the popular children’s program Higglytown Heroes as an example. The writers work at home different places far from each other.

I cannot imagine how our life would be now if these changes didn’t happen completely agree with the idea. I think it shifted our daily life. Now we can do things much easier and faster

The World Is Flat

While I was Sleeping

Thomas Friedman, the American genius writer, in the first chapter, While I was Sleeping, in his book, the World is Flat, talks about some facts and identifies some terms, concerning globalization and outsourcing.  Friedman divides human history into three different eras: globalization 01, 02, and 03. According to Friedman, Globalization began the moment that Columbus discovered that the world was round. He also goes further and shows how the stages affect life.  The main effect of globalization on society is acceleration and advancement of trade. In the end of the chapter, Friedman travels through Japan, China and back to America, and talks about different types of business outsourcing. He saw many things that show the phenomenon of business outsourcing, such as Pizza Hut, Epson, HP and Texas Instruments during a round of golf in India.

As it is defined in Wikipedia, “open source” software is software that provides the source code. The source code which is copyrighted by the holder is available to all users. Therefore, the users can edit the software. When people hear the term “open source” software, they immediately think of Linus Torvalds, who founded Linux, a UNIX based operating.

Examples of open source software are Perl, PHP, and Python, which are computer programming languages.  Another example is Linux, which is an operating system. Also, Apache, which is server software, and OpenOffice, which is a desktop application, are examples of open source software

Actually, it is not appropriate to whether open source is better than proprietary software because both have benefits. Open source developers get the software and they are not doing that for profit, which is the sole open source’s copyright. However, proprietary software companies‘main intent is to profit. If they don’t work to protect their product, somebody will steal the software and sell it, in  which case they will lose their money they have invested in and their entire job.