That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [39]
It was telling that the small Eko team included graduates from India’s most prestigious institutes of technology, who were working in America but decided to return to Delhi to join this start-up. Jishnu Kinwar, who earned a master’s in computer science from Lamar University in Texas and an MBA from the University of Alabama, worked for ten years in the United States before he and his wife left their plum jobs to head back to Delhi, where Kinwar now works in the Eko garage. The chief operating officer, Matteo Chiampo, is an Italian technologist who left a good job in Boston to work in India because, as he put it, this is “where the excitement is.”
The same forces empowering EndoStim and Eko are also empowering one- and two-person firms that can go global from anywhere. We can see this in the multibillion-dollar come-out-of-nowhere “apps” industry. Apple released the iPhone in June 2007 and the iPad in April 2010. A 2011 report produced by Forrester Research estimated that the revenue generated through the sales of smartphone and tablet applications will reach $38 billion annually by 2015. Think about that: An industry that did not exist in 2006 will be generating $38 billion in revenues within a decade, with a slew of new online stores—Google’s Android Market, Microsoft’s Marketplace, BlackBerry’s App World, and Hewlett-Packard’s Palm App Catalog. Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad alone already had generated some 350,000 apps when we wrote this book in the winter of 2011, and the company had paid more than $2 billion to developers of programs sold at its App Store. The potential for individuals today to globalize their talents, hobbies, and passions into applications with a worldwide market is without precedent in history and unbounded in potential.
That’s the good news. The bad news, or, as we prefer to call it, “the challenging news,” is this: The emerging apps industry combines software, art, math, creativity, writing, gaming, education, composing, and marketing—everything that goes into different applications. In other words, it requires combining the skills of MIT, MTV, and Madison Avenue. These skills, in turn, require a lot more training and creativity than just writing software code.
Within a few years, virtually everyone on the planet will have the tools and network connections to participate in the hyper-connected flat world. As that happens, all of these instruments of innovation and connectivity will become what electricity is for most of the world. “You will just presume they are there—they will actually just disappear into the background,” argues Joel Cawley, the vice president for strategy at IBM. And as that happens, two things will differentiate companies, countries, and individuals from one another, Cawley says. One is analytics. Once everyone is connected, your prosperity will depend on how well you or your company or country can “analyze and apply” all the data pouring through these networks to optimize your ability to provide better health care, education, e-commerce, innovation, customer service, and government services to everyone on the network. After all, the tools your company uses to perform all of this analysis will be sitting there in the cloud for every other company to use as well.
Also, once all the technology is a given, Cawley predicts, “all the old-fashioned stuff will start to matter even more.” Then “the only advantage you can have is in the human stuff.” How good is your school system? How well have you trained your workers? What kind of creativity, inspiration, and imagination do they bring to this platform? How good is your rule of law and your national governance, and how smart are your regulatory, patent, and tax policies? “These,” said