1: 11/9/89 - Berlin Wall Crumbles
My fave quote from this section was "Walls had fallen, Windows had opened". This can be seen as literal because the time the Berlin Wall came down, it was the same time the birth of PCs arrived. Very creative.
2: 8/9/95 Launch of Netscape
Bringing back Netscape was fun as it brought me down memory lane. I used to go on Netscape ALL the time. That was my browser. Than Microsoft pretty much forced IE down our throat and I've been using IE ever sense.
3: Work Flow Software
The example of how the animation studio "Wild Brian" is using the supply chain in the movie industry was cool. Especially since this is the industry I plan in going into next year. Having writers in NY, animators in LA, and have actors do voices over the internet is amazing on how far we have came in the past century.
4: Open Sourcing
I liked how Friendman mentioned Wikipedia as the new open-source Encyclopedia. Everyone uses it. This is my favorite site. Another good quote describing the mission statement for Wikipedia is "giving every single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge".
5: Outsourcing
I remember back in the late 1999 everybody was freaking about the Y2K bug. Everyone thought the world was going to end and all computers would die. Little did we know, on the other side of the world Indians were working with fiber optic cables and technologies to prevent the world going into a chaos.
Main Point: Why Friedman Is A Hypocrite
I don't understand how someone can write an entire book on how "The World Is Flat" and then can't accept some of the new features the Internet is offering to the help "flatten" the world. I'm talking about him whining about how Amazon.com is showing free sample chapters to users and also selling his used books.
You can't "praise" the Internet for being revolutionizing the world and then be upset that people are using it to make smart purchases. He mentions how "cool" it would be to be able to scan a Madonna poster to sample songs from her CD, but is mad that people are sampling a chapter from his book. HYPOCRITE!
3 comments:
I enjoyed reading your blog for chapter two and believe that you brought up an interesting point about the author being a hypocrite. Even though that never occurred to me, you are correct! If he is so into all of the "flattening" going on throughout the world today, he should be fine with Amazon showing parts of his book. In fact, I would think he'd be honored and would believe that it would lead to more copies being bought in the long-run (because Amazon is a type of advertisement and marketing campaign for him).
Thank you, This is my favorite blog of all. Friedman in a total hypocrite and contradict's himself throughout the book. Maybe he's just trying to add more pages to annoy us and show the con's, maybe he's playing devils advocate, who knows. But I think this chapter is a waste of 233 pages, it could of been its own book. Or he could of just condensed it, because he elaborates on each flattener throughout the book. I believe for Friedman is what's old is new again. Friedman should of combined #4-#8 flatteners b/c they deal with the same matter.
I have to agree with you all here. This man contradicts himself often. I began to think he just wanted to play devils advocate and present two sides to every argument! Not only that but he is repetitive. He managed to make every point two or three times by phrasing it differently. I would have enjoyed the book more if he made clear concise arguments and moved on!
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