world flatterners
#1: Collapse of the Berlin Wall – 11/9/89: Friedman called the flattener, “When the walls came down, and the windows came up.” The event not only symbolized the end of the cold War, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. “11/9/89″ is a discussion about the Berlin Wall coming down, the “fall” of communism, and the impact that Windows powered PCs (personal computers) had on the ability of individuals to create their own content and connect to one another. At this point, the basic platform for the revolution to follow was created: IBM PC, Windows, a standardized graphical interface for word processing, dial up modems, a standardized tool for communication, and a global phone network.
#2: Netscape – 8/9/95: Netscape went public at the price of $28. Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by “early adopters and geeks” to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year olds. The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.
#3: Workflow software: Friedman’s catch-all for the standards and technologies that allowed work to flow. The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved, as stated by Friedman. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a “crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration”. There was an emergence of software protocols (SMTP – simple mail transfer protocol; HTML – the language that enabled anyone to design and publish documents that could be transmitted to and read on any computer anywhere) Standards on Standards. This is what Friedman called the “Genesis moment of the flat world.” The net result “is that people can work with other people on more stuff than ever before.” This created a
#2: Netscape – 8/9/95: Netscape went public at the price of $28. Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by “early adopters and geeks” to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year olds. The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.
#3: Workflow software: Friedman’s catch-all for the standards and technologies that allowed work to flow. The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved, as stated by Friedman. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a “crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration”. There was an emergence of software protocols (SMTP – simple mail transfer protocol; HTML – the language that enabled anyone to design and publish documents that could be transmitted to and read on any computer anywhere) Standards on Standards. This is what Friedman called the “Genesis moment of the flat world.” The net result “is that people can work with other people on more stuff than ever before.” This created a