The World Is Flat: Part 3

Brandi Barnett

1/26/13

IST 1100

       This week in reading The World Is Flat I read something I thought I had already known, but that was not the case. You do learn something new every day even when you thought you had the answer to that something it just opened your eyes to something much greater. Today I will be discussing: off-shoring, supply chain, and Google. 

Off-shoring is when a company moves a factory to another country and getting work done and Outsourcing is getting work out to an organization with a set of skills. Many reasons companies choose to go the off-shoring route is because it is cheaper that way and fewer taxes as well. 

 Supply chain is to create a value between consumers and the store. The author then sets up an example regarding Wal-Mart and how they use the supply chain to their advantage and makes next to nothing. During the holiday seasons even when the product may not be the best quality they still sell millions upon millions of merchandise because their prices are so low. Since, Wal-Mart has such low prices the employees suffer because of it with little to no benefits and reduced salaries. 

Google has become something we all rely on and it is available 24/7 and provides all this information you can ever dream of within seconds. And all that information stored in a single stroke. Google has affected the business world in a good way. Instead of having you or some assistant thumb through a lot of old boxes of documents you can just go through Google and it will have your answer waiting for you. You become your own researcher. Search engines have a lot of knowledge behind them. But, with knowledge comes a price. Google could also stir up trouble by having unwanted information out there for everyone to see. If we heavily rely on a computer generated search engine were not truly applying ourselves to learn. 

I enjoyed this section of the book. I learned a lot of things I didn't know and a lot of things I knew but was misinformed. There was a lot I wanted to say but it was all jumbled in my head and couldn't properly form it into words/sentences. 

The Wold Is Flat: Part 2

Brandi Barnett
1/17/13
IST 1100

Well here we are again fellow lurkers it is another assignment on why Thomas L. Friedman thinks the world is flat. This time around the paper-blog will be discussing more computer based technical advances. The life advances on why the world may be flat include: Workflow software allowed work to flow, open source software where you are collaborating on projects , and outsourcing is split services.

     Workflow software no one really knew what it was and pretty much was kept on the down low. It was a way of communicating with business associates all the way around the world in a better fashion. Of course, with all this new technology people started to get greedy and wanted more to do with this new found invention. Consumers wanted to buy and sell things over the internet and may be provide good with whatever they came up with. Then, came programs like HTML it provided consumers the same based computer language. Another example of workflow software is PDF, which is a file format that captures elements of a printed document as an electronic image. It has become a big thing in the college world.

     Open source software is a free based downloading source that lets people contribute and improve the software. It should be free and free to all. Open source was created so people can get out of the control of corporations. Mozilla Firebox is an open source software which is a free web browser installation. It had over ten million downloads. One of the reasons why it is so popular is that you can add extensions sometimes for free to the browser like an app. This was a huge turn around that can actually help people in other parts of the world. Since, out source programs can literally run on any sized computer. The internet explorer is dying a slow death.

     Outsourcing was probably the only thins that came out positive during the Y2K phenomenon. Computers went into a frenzy during the 90’s with the height of Y2K. It was too much for the every day worker with hardly any knowledge on how to correctly fix a computer problem they realized they can rely on other people and not just people from inside their own house. This is where India enters the equation they had enough software engineers and people who can fix the problem with their advanced skills and so many IT schools. It was not just beneficial and problem solving situation it was learned that by using sources from the outside world it is a lot cheaper and faster to get something done correctly and on time.

     This book is definitely an interesting read it is not something I would generally go and pick up myself. Out of the six events that have caused the world to go flat so far that has been covered. I have only found one to be enjoyable. I hope you are enjoying the book so far than I have. I can not wait till it picks up some speed and covers events I am truly interested and invested in. Maybe off shoring will be it.

The World Is Flat: Part 1

Brandi Barnett
1/12/13
IST 1100

        I have heard about this book through out the years and never would have thought to get it since I 

heard so much about it already and just by the title of the book I already knew what it would be about. Well 

I was wrong. The author, Thomas L. Friedman, goes in depth on why the world the flat just by the economic 

of it and globalization of the world. Not, just by traveling the world going by distance like Columbus had did 

previously. The author goes on to tell us how major historical events flattened the world. It was interesting 

to read what he had discovered and some things he noted made sense in a way. Certain events can literally 

shape the world. 

  Globalization is the interchange of world views. Friedman breaks down the globalization into three parts 

1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Friedman, notes that the Globalization 1.0  is the first era went from a small size world to 

about a large size in a matter of minutes. It was all about what kind of muscle you had. It had the power to 

change. Globalization 2.0 was the era of the Great Depression and Cold Wars and introduced us to certain 

companies and took us back to being small and it opened the world to the internet. It was considered the 

global integration.  Globalization 3.0 went from small to tiny and  is all about the individuals and the power 

they hold. 

     The first example he gives is the fall of the Berlin Wall and how it became the center of the world

becoming flat so to speak. The of the Berlin Wall to Thomas L. Friedman, the author, believed it tipped the 

balance of power across the world. With the wall still standing there was two big players at play capitalism 

and communism when the wall fell there was only one power. The fall of the Berlin Wall helped free-market 

capitalism and it also helped see the world differently. It only takes one major thing to affect other 

events as well. 
  Netscape was very important in the land of events of making this world flat. Before they came along we 

had no way to instantly communicate with one another and provide essential research. Sure, we did fine 

before technology came into play, but it made it easier or some would say lazier to people around the world.  

It brought the internet on its toes and made it available for anyone to use. With so much demand for certain 

networks it spawned a whole bunch of operating systems such as Windows 95 which, became the number 

one consumer use world wide. People were communicating via the internet left and right with people all over 

the world  before we knew it. Netscape also started the dot com sensation. The internet-email-interacting-

phase became the reason of globalization 3.0.

      I really liked reading the interview between the author and the CEO of Netscape. It was such a telling 

interview and learned a lot of things about how the internet became this important technology in our daily 

lives. Who knew it would become such a hit and influence today’s world. It defiantly makes the world a bit 

more flat. of course, being a kid that was brought into the early days of technology this interested me more 

than the Berlin Wall.