The World is Flat: A Book Review

I greatly enjoyed reading Thomas L Friedman’s “The World is flat”.

In the context of international trade and also competition, the term “level playing field” is often bandied around. A “level playing field” is one where each combatant has the same rules and no specific discrimination against them.

What happens if a lot of countries implement level playing fields? The whole world becomes a level playing field – the world becomes flat.

What happens after that, according to classical economic theory, is that the law of competitive advantage applies. If one country has a natural advantage over another in the production of a particular good or service, then they will be able to charge a lower price and production will move to that country.

The thesis of Friedman’s book is that the theoretical level playing fields and competitive advantage, have become reality. He argues persuasively, citing statistics and anecdotal material from interviews with key players up to the end of 2004.

The IT industry, in particular is exemplified as a flattened industry. He portrays the Americans losing jobs to Indians, in danger of losing their jobs to the 300 million Chinese learning English. Wherever smart software engineers are found, the almost zero cost of the Internet has enabled them to compete on the playing field.

The zero Internet cost alludes to some of the key enablers of the flat world. OpenSource is cited as one. I like the way he describes OpenSource as Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities. I am beginning to think that collaborating on software that is free in a GNU sense, is almost an emergent property of the Internet.

For anyone who has lived through the IT revolution of the last 20 years, Friedman appears a little naive at times. He seems to have fallen into the clutches of Craig Mundie, CTO of Micro$oft. He rightly considers the PC a flattener. He thinks Windows was way more significant than I would ascribe. My view is, that far from being a flattener, Windows stymied innovation, and held up the emergence of the world we now have by a decade.

In the end, you have to love one of the flatteners. The date 9 September 1995. Don’t remember? What started the .com boom? Still don’t remember? Read the book.