That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [33]
That is how much has changed in just the last six years. In fact, so many new technologies and services have been introduced that we would argue that sometime around the year 2010 we entered Flat World 2.0—a difference of degree that deserves its own designation. That is because Flat World 2.0 is everything Flat World 1.0 was, but with so many more people able to connect to the Flat World platform, so many more people able to communicate with others who are also connected, and so many more people now empowered to find other people of like mind to collaborate with—whether to support a politician, follow a rock group, invent a product, or launch a revolution—based on shared values, interests, and ideals.
We look at it this way: Flat World 1.0 was built around the PC-server relationship. In order to participate, most everyone had to use a laptop or a desktop computer—usually connected by landline or fiber-optic cable to an Internet Web server somewhere. It was not very mobile, and the cost of participating still excluded some people. You had to have enough money to buy a desktop or a laptop, rent one at an Internet café, or use one at the office where you worked. The penetration was global, and in that sense it really did flatten the world, thanks to the rapid diffusion of landlines and fiber cable on land and undersea, but it tended to connect people living in cities and towns—less so villages and countryside—who were of a certain minimum income level.
Flat World 1.0 was particularly strong not only at enabling individuals to take part in a global conversation via e-mail, but also at enabling people to work together to make stuff, sell stuff, and buy stuff—from more places than ever before. It was great at enabling Boeing to make part of its 777 jetliner with a team that included designers in Moscow, wing manufacturers in China, and control electronics producers in Wichita. It was great at enabling the outsourcing of everything from the reading of X-rays to the tracing of lost luggage on Delta flights. It was great for empowering powerful breakthroughs in online education, entertainment, publishing, and commerce, and actually enhancing the cultural diversity of the world, not squashing it. And it was great for promoting global collaboration among individuals, so that “the crowd” could write and then upload everything from an encyclopedia (Wikipedia) to a new operating system for PCs (Linux).
Flat World 2.0 is doing all that still—and more—because it is being driven by the diffusion of more PCs (more than 350 million were sold in 2010), as well as by smartphones enabled with text messaging, Web browsers, and cameras, as well as by wireless connectivity in place of landlines to reach more remote communities, as well as by new social networks that enable collaboration on more and more things. And all of these activities are now increasingly being supported by a vast new array of software applications stored on huge interlinked server farms known collectively as “the cloud.”
The cloud really is a “new, new thing.” It holds every imaginable software program and every imaginable application—from bird-watching guides for southern Africa to investing guides for Wall Street—and it is being updated seamlessly every moment. The beauty of the cloud, and the reason that it is driving the flattening further and faster, is that it can turn any desktop, laptop, or simple handheld device with a browser into an information-creation or -consumption powerhouse by serving as a central location for those myriad applications, which run on individual user’s devices.
Amazon.com, for example, is now selling not only books and chain saws but business facilities in the cloud. Andy Jassy is Amazon’s senior vice