My coworker Dennis and I frequently have discussions about politics, business, and technology and where all are heading. Dennis raised a good point to me the other day: since he and I are so constantly exposed to ways technology is being used, why aren’t we thinking up some new way to use the internet as a business platform. The main driving force behind this questioning was the book “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. This book has been popping up all over in Dennis’s life and I just read it. Dennis’s conservative inlaws has read it, one of the owners of Krekow Jennings has read it and it’s showing up all over in other places too.
The subtitle of the book claims it to be a “Brief History of the 21st Century”, and I think it does a wonderful job of presenting that, at least from an economic standpoint and to a small degree a cultural one. The basic premise of the book is that technology has lowered the boundaries of competition and collaboration in major areas of the world, such as India and China, and this leveled playing field, or flatness of the world, is causing rapid and dramatic changes in our lives.
Some of the early writing about the history of the internet and some computer technology is a little dull for me since that information already such a part of my professional life, but the section on open source software is interesting to me for its non tech-nerd viewpoint. We’re only just beginning to see what this open source mentality can do for us, and this mentality is spreading to many areas other than software: voting machines and practices, data formats in government, open society, and much more.
The book does a good job of explaining our rapidly changing world, and even goes so far as to offer suggestions about general solutions to some of the problems we’re beginning to face (outsourcing, education, pollution, leadership failure, and more). You may not agree with the suggested solutions, but the big picture view of the world in the last few years is too well put together to be ignored. This is an excellent follow-up to Friedman’s last book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.
Back to Dennis’s point about us doing something in this new, flat world: I want to come up with something novel that utilizes all this great flat world technology. I need to turn on my creative thinking instead of just absorbing all this information. I’m always impressed with simple, but genious ideas like Million Dollar Hompage, where some college kid is selling pixel adspace and could very well make a million bucks with hardly any work. I almost just want to copy this idea, but I’d much rather come up with something myself. Commence thinking!