The World is Flat - 2

3 .Open Sourcing: The rise of Apache as a competitor for IBM, Microsoft and other web servers marked the beginning of the Open Source movement. The motivation for Open Source comes for a variety of reasons including creating something that does not exist in the market place or to get credit for going toe to toe with the big guys. The genesis of OS can be traced back to academia. Academics were the earliest pioneers of collaborating and sharing information.

Then came along CVS and then Apache. IBM built Websphere on top of Apache.

Today about 66% on all websites use Apache.
4. Outsourcing Y2K: Modern India did one thing well. It educated a large percent of its elite in Science and Technology. The US got to buy India's brainpower. In the late 90s India's fortunes grew due to development of Fiber Optics and the Y2K problems. It strengthened relationships between India and the US.

5.Y2k was followed by a boom in eCommerce. The dot com bust helped India gain more employment for its educated engineers.IT companies in the US had to find cheaper labor in India.

6. Offshoring: China was now playing in the same field as other economic powers. By joining the WTO, China was moving quickly. Offshoring is different from outsourcing. It involves porting an entire factory to another place. Offshoring to China meant lesser costs for organizations. This also meant that foreign companies could sell to anyone, anywhere in China. China could produce workers of varying skill levels and has become the most popular place to offshore companies.

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Book Summary The World is Flat-1

Friedman's book opens in a golf course in Bangalore, where a deluge of multinational brand names permeate every part of the surroundings. The thesis of this book is that technological development has enabled countries like India to compete with developed countries for IT work at an equal footing.Outsourcing has moved from IT work and call centers to other fields like accounting, tax preparation. Thanks to technology, privacy of the customer is protected from the ousourcee.Anything which can be moved around will be moved around. eg: Outsourcing, Jet Blue's Home sourcing to housewives in Utah.The 10 forces that flatten the worldThe fall of the Berlin wall in Dec. 1989: This marked the victory of free markets. It unlocked the creativity drive of India, China and allowed for 'best practices. Improved communication forced the flow on information even into and from the iron curtain.Netscape files IPO in Aug. 1989: Browser technology is one of the most important technology advances in modern History. It enabled sharing files in ways never done before. Anyone could shared files and information across the internet. Internet technologies work together to allow interoperability and knowledge sharing. The public now wanted a single network and applications that competed once someone was on the internet. However, with Microsoft's tactics, Netscape was sold to AOL for a song($10M). We then saw the rise and fall of the Internet bubble. It led to the fiber optics bubble where small players fought giant telecom companies and built infrastructure. The law of large numbers took hold and long distance rates fell ten fold.
Work flow Software: Teams with members in disparate physical locations could now coordinate and collaborate on joint projects, design, selling and service activities. New software programs could now optimize the use of powerful computers and put them to work beyond email and browers. This led to the development of Web Services and communication between programs. Workflow programs showed up in manufacturing, household accounting and movie making. Work could be divided and sent to varied people in varied locations. This needed common standards to exchange information. We see standards around payrolls, supply chains and ecommerce to allow seamless integration between software programs.

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