The World is Flat

The only thing that I revealed for myself while listening to Thomas Friedman’s speech was that "I was sleeping" as well! I knew that the world was round, but Flat? That was something new and unexpected for me. Due to T. Friedman’s speech I hopefully understood why he calls the world flat. I guess he wanted to show the world as a global platform in terms of commerce where all competitors have an equal opportunity. And by saying flat he means that the world shifted from being vertical to horizontal, that is to say the world became globalized. Several technological and political forces have converged and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance or even language. This is a real revolution and this revolution enables the whole world to be interconnected with each other. So it means that the world became a global market where people can work together and they can collaborate regardless their historical and geographical divisions.

Friedman mentions six flatteners that are viewed as leveling the global playing field and these flatteners are the following: 

• Outsourcing
•  Open sourcing (e.g. Firefox, Wikipedia, etc)
• Supply-chaining
• Offshoring
•  Insourcing
•  Informing.

He mentions that until the year 2000 the above mentioned flatteners were independent from each other and the proof of that is the incapability of one machine performing several functions. But today due to the emergence of hardware and software multiple functions such as e-mail, fax, printing and copying are able to be done from one machine. Thus, he assumes that finally all these six flatteners started to reinforce each other and they became interconnected. And actually this flattened the world.

That was how I understood and interpreted Thomas Friedman’s words.