It's A Flat World, After All

April 3, 2005

It's a Flat World, After All

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set sail for India, going west. He had the Nina, the Pinta and the

Santa Maria. He never did find India, but he called the people he met ''Indians'' and came home and

reported to his king and queen: ''The world is round.'' I set off for India 512 years later. I knew just

which direction I was going. I went east. I had Lufthansa business class, and I came home and

reported only to my wife and only in a whisper: ''The world is flat.''

And therein lies a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives --

much, much more quickly than many people realize. It all happened while we were sleeping, or

rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron -- which even prompted some to

wonder whether globalization was over. Actually, just the opposite was true, which is why it's time

to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time

to waste.

I wish I could say I saw it all coming. Alas, I encountered the flattening of the world quite by

accident. It was in late February of last year, and I was visiting the Indian high-tech capital,

Bangalore,

working on a documentary for the Discovery Times channel about outsourcing. In short order, I

interviewed Indian entrepreneurs who wanted to prepare my taxes from Bangalore, read my X-rays

from Bangalore, trace my lost luggage from Bangalore and write my new software from Bangalore.

The longer I was there, the more upset I became -- upset at the realization that while I had been off

covering the 9/11 wars, globalization had entered a whole new phase, and I had missed it. I guess

the eureka moment came on a visit to the campus of Infosys Technologies, one of the crown jewels

of the Indian outsourcing and software industry. Nandan Nilekani, the Infosys C.E.O., was

showing me his global video-conference room, pointing with pride to a wall-size flat-screen TV,

which he said was the biggest in Asia. Infosys, he explained, could hold a virtual meeting of the key

players from its entire global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So

its American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their

Asian manufacturers all at once. That's what globalization is all about today, Nilekani said. Above

the screen there were eight clocks that pretty well summed up the Infosys workday: 24/7/365. The

clocks were labeled U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the

world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive

investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were

invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At

the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was

an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop

up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing,

making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came

together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual

capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed,

produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we

do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is

really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear.

He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now

able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better

get ready for this. As I left the Infosys campus that evening and bounced along the potholed road

back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: ''The playing field is being leveled.''

''What Nandan is saying,'' I thought, ''is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened?

Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!''

Here I was in Bangalore -- more than 500 years after Columbus sailed over the horizon, looking

for a shorter route to India using the rudimentary navigational technologies of his day, and returned

safely to prove definitively that the world was round -- and one of India's smartest engineers, trained

at

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