The three great eras of globalization
The thing that gives [the third great era of globalization] its unique character...is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally.
Excerpt from The World Is Flat, Chapter 1, "While I Was Sleeping," p. 9 ff.
[T]here have been three great eras of globalization. The first lasted from 1492 -- when Columbus set sail, opening trade between the Old World and the New World -- until around 1800... [This first great era of globalization] was about countries and muscles... The second great era...lasted roughly from 1800 to 2000... [T]he key agent of change, the dynamic force driving global integration, was multinational companies. These multinationals went global for markets and labor, spearheaded first by the expansion of the Dutch and English joint-stock companies and the Industrial Revolution. In the first half of this era, global integration was powered by falling transportation costs, thanks to the steam engine and the railroad, and in the second half by falling telecommunication costs -- thanks to the diffusion of the telegraph, telephones, the PC, satellites, fiber-optic cable, and the early version of the World Wide Web... [A]round the year 2000 we entered a whole new era... [T]he thing that gives it its unique character...is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the lever that is enabling individuals and groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is not horsepower, and not hardware, but software -- all sorts of new applications -- in conjunction with the creation of a global fiber-optic network that has made us all next-door neighbors.
Posted by admin at 10:58 PM
The world is flat
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened...Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!?
Excerpt from The World Is Flat, Chapter 1, "While I Was Sleeping," p. 6 ff.
Excerpt from The World Is Flat, Chapter 1, "While I Was Sleeping," p. 6 ff.
"Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world, Nilekani explained [Nandan Nilekani, CEO, Infosys Technologies Limited, Bangalore, India]. "What happened over the last few years is that there was massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things." At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of software -- e-mail, search engines like Google, and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore, and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, added Nilekani, they "created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced, and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature...And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together." ...What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!
Posted by admin at 10:43 PM