That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [32]
Second, the Internet and the World Wide Web that spread across the globe in the late 1990s suddenly gave people the ability to send their digital content to so many more places and to share it, and work together on it, with so many more people for the low costs associated with gaining access to a PC and an Internet connection.
Finally, and contemporaneous with that, a quiet revolution, but a hugely important one, was taking place. It was a revolution in software programming languages and transmission protocols that go by names such as HTML, HTTP, XML, SOAP, AJAX, EDI, FTP, SSH, SFTP, VAN, SMTP, and AS2. You don’t really need to know what they all stand for; you just need to know that together this alphabet soup has made everyone’s desktop computer, laptop, BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad, and no-name Chinese or Indian cell phone interoperable with everyone else’s. Call it the “workflow revolution” because it has made digital content flow securely in all directions. As a result, anyone could get on his or her computer or cell phone and dispatch a PDF, e-mail a friend, text a colleague, or transmit a picture and know that whatever was said, posted, texted, videoed, PowerPointed, or e-mailed could go anywhere in the world and be accessed from anywhere in the world—no matter what computer or software was being used to send and receive it. That all feels totally natural today, but it was truly revolutionary at the time, when so many people were running different machines using different operating systems and software.
Put these three innovations all together and the result was that in the span of a decade, people in Boston, Bangkok, and Bangalore, Mumbai, Manhattan, and Moscow, all became virtual next-door neighbors. Probably two billion new people suddenly found themselves with new powers to communicate, compete, and collaborate globally—as individuals. Whereas previously it was largely only countries and companies who could act globally in this way, when the world got flat, individuals could act globally—as individuals—and more and more of them every day.
Flat World 2.0
According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, as of 2010 there were about 4.6 billion cell phones in use worldwide. There are 6.8 billion people on the planet, so the number of cell phones in circulation now equals roughly two-thirds of the world’s total population. Since there were only about one billion cell-phone subscribers worldwide in 2002, it is clear that the rate of growth is staggering—with most of it now coming from the developing world: India, for example, is adding 15 to 18 million cell-phone users a month. According to the ITU, about 23 percent of the global population uses the Internet today, up from 12 percent in 2002. Every day now there are millions of free or dirt-cheap interactions and collaborations happening in places and among people who were not connected just five years ago. We know where this eventually goes—to universal connectivity to the Internet via cell phone, smartphone, or traditional computer, probably within a decade.
“I call my mother in Karachi every day. I use Skype and she uses her regular phone. It costs so little, it’s almost free,” Raziuddin Syed, a senior IT engineer based in Tampa, Florida, told the Pakistani newspaper Dawn (February 20, 2011). Syed “works for an international accounting firm, thanks to internet-connected laptop computer and the Voice over Internet Protocol technology. ‘Five years ago the cost of phone calls, especially those using VOIP, was much higher than it is today. Calls between members of services like Skype are always free but calls to other phones, landlines or mobiles, carry a very small per minute charge,’ Syed says.”
In other words, since The World Is Flat was published in 2005, the world has only gotten, well, flatter. How far and how fast have we