That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [34]
Although all shoppers are welcome, this Amazon, [Jassy] explains, is for business customers and isn’t well marked on the home page. It’s called Amazon Web Services, or AWS … , which rents out computing power for pennies an hour. “This completely levels the playing field,” Jassy boasts. AWS makes it possible for anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card to access the same kind of world-class computing systems that Amazon uses to run its $34 billion-a-year retail operation … AWS is growing like crazy. Although he won’t cite exact numbers, Jassy claims “hundreds of thousands of customers” already use the service, and analysts at UBS estimate Amazon will do about $750 million of business on AWS this year. In fact, a whole generation of Internet companies couldn’t exist without it. Netflix’s movie-streaming empire runs on it; Zynga, the social gaming company, uses it to handle sudden spikes in usage. AWS has become such a fact of life for Silicon Valley startups that venture capitalists actually hand out Amazon gift cards to entrepreneurs. Keeping up with the demand requires frantic expansion: Each day, Jassy’s operation adds enough computing muscle to power one whole Amazon.com circa 2000, when it was a $2.8 billion business. The physical expansion of all that data takes place in Amazon’s huge, specially designed buildings—the biggest can reach 700,000 square feet, or the equivalent of roughly 16 football fields. These interconnected facilities, scattered all over the world, are where AWS conducts its business: cloud computing. The “cloud” refers to the amorphous, out-of-sight, out-of-mind mess of computer tasks that happen on someone else’s equipment.
Though the cloud is still in its infancy, in 2009 alone global data flows grew by 50 percent thanks in part to its emergence, along with wireless connectivity. “The more people are connected, the more people connect,” said Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Léo Apotheker, “so you get these network effects, and that is just flattening the world even more every day.”
Indeed, every day more and more of the features that defined the personal computer are finding their way into the phone and the tablet. True, the majority of the world’s people still don’t have smartphones. But you can see the future, and it will be smart; there will be Web- and video-enabled phones everywhere for everyone—and sooner than you think. As a result, another two billion people are joining the daily global conversation, with more and cheaper tools they can use to connect, compete, and collaborate on the global playing field. Many of them can just dive right in and start texting on their phones, without having to buy or rent a PC or learn any software-writing program.
To summarize: Flat World 1.0, from roughly 1995 to 2005, made Boston and Bangalore next-door neighbors. Flat World 2.0, from 2005 to the present, is making Boston, Bangalore, and Sirsi next-door neighbors. Where is Sirsi? Sirsi is an agricultural trading center of 90,000 people some 275 miles from Bangalore in the Indian countryside. And this is happening everywhere in every country.
In Flat World 1.0, said Alan Cohen, Vice President of Mobility Solutions at Cisco Systems, “everyone was a consumer of goods and information in what has become the ultimate consumer marketplace. You could buy anything from anyone anywhere.” Some people also became producers of goods and information (people who had never dreamed of being able to do so in the past), starting their own websites or uploading and sharing their opinions, music, pictures, software programs, or encyclopedia entries. This new Flat World 2.0 platform for connectivity, being so cheap and mobile, continues and broadens that phenomenon into the most remote areas, bringing a whole new swath of humanity into the game. It can only lead to more innovation of all sorts much faster.“Imagine