The World Is Flat

by Thomas L. Friedman

  But just as Google can track what you are searching for, so too can TiVo, which knows which shows and which ads you are freezing, storing, and rewinding on your own TV. So here’s a news quiz: Guess what was the most rewound moment in TV history? Answer: Janet’s Jackson breast exposure, or, as it was euphemistically called, her “wardrobe malfunction,” at the 2004 Super Bowl. Just ask TiVo. In a press release it issued on February 2, 2004, TiVo said, “Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson stole the show during Sunday’s Super Bowl, attracting almost twice as many viewers as the most thrilling moments on the field, according to an annual measurement of second-by-second viewership in TiVo households. The Jackson-Timberlake moment drew the biggest spike in audience reaction TiVo has ever measured. TiVo said viewership spiked up to 180 percent as hundreds of thousands of households used TiVo’s unique capabilities to pause and replay live television to view the incident again and again.”

  So if everyone can increasingly watch what he wants however many times he wants when he wants, the whole notion of broadcast TV—which is that we throw shows out there one time, along with their commercials, and then try to survey who is watching—will increasingly make less and less sense. The companies you want to bet on are those that, like Google or Yahoo! or TiVo, learn to collaborate with their users and offer them shows and advertisements tailored just for them. I can imagine a day soon when advertisers won’t pay for anything other than that.

  Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and TiVo have learned to thrive not by pushing products and services on their customers as much as by building collaborative systems that enable customers to pull on their own, and then responding with lightning quickness to what they pull. It is so much more efficient.

  “Search is so highly personal that searching is empowering for hup. 157mans like nothing else,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “It is the antithesis of being told or taught. It is about self-empowerment; it is empowering individuals to do what they think best with the information they want. It is very different from anything else that preceded it. Radio was one-to-many. TV was one-to-many. The telephone was one-to-one. Search is the ultimate expression of the power of the individual, using a computer, looking at the world, and finding exactly what they want—and everyone is different when it comes to that.”

  Of course what made Google not just a search engine but a hugely profitable business was its founders’ realization that they could build a targeted advertising model that would show you ads that are relevant to you when you searched for a specific topic and then could charge advertisers for the number of times Google users clicked on their ads. Whereas CBS broadcasts a movie and has a less exact idea who is watching it or the advertisements, Google knows exactly what you are interested in—after all, you are searching for it—and can link you up with advertisers directly or indirectly connected to your searches. In late 2004, Google began a service whereby if you are walking around Bethesda, Maryland, and are in the mood for sushi, you just send Google an SMS message on your cell phone that says “Sushi 20817”—the Bethesda zip code—and it will send you back a text message of choices. Lord only knows where this will go.

  In-forming, though, also involves searching for friends, allies, and collaborators. It is empowering the formation of global communities, across all international and cultural boundaries, which is another critically important flattening function. People can now search out fellow collaborators on any subject, project, or theme—particularly through portals like Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo! has about 300 million users and 4 million active groups. Those groups have 13 million unique individuals accessing them each month from all over the world.

  “The Internet is growing in the self-services area, and Yahoo! Groups exemplifies this trend,” said Jerry Yang. “It provides a forum, a platform, a set of tools for people to have private, semiprivate, or public gatherings on the Internet regardless of geography or time. It enables consumers to gather around topics that are meaningful to them in ways that are either p. 158 impractical or impossible offline. Groups can serve as support groups for complete strangers who are galvanized by a common issue (coping with rare diseases, first-time parents, spouses of active-duty personnel) or who seek others who share similar interests (hobbies as esoteric as dogsledding, blackjack, and indoor tanning have large memberships). Existing communities can migrate online and flourish in an interactive environment (local kids’ soccer league, church youth group, alumni organizations), providing a virtual home for groups interested in sharing, organizing, and communicating information valuable to cultivating vibrant communities. Some groups exist only online and could never be as successful offline, while others mirror strong real-world communities. Groups can be created instantaneously and dissolved; topics can change or stay constant. This trend will only grow as consumers increasingly become publishers, and they can seek the affinity and community they choose—when, where, and how they choose it.”

  There is another side to in-forming that people are going to have to get used to, and that is other people’s ability to in-form themselves about you from a very early age. Search engines flatten the world by eliminating all the valleys and peaks, all the walls and rocks, that people used to hide inside of, atop, behind, or under in order to mask their reputations or parts of their past. In a flat world, you can’t run, you can’t hide, and smaller and smaller rocks are turned over. Live your life honestly, because whatever you do, whatever mistakes you make, will be searchable one day. The flatter the world becomes, the more ordinary people become transparent—and available. Before my daughter Orly went off to college in the fall of 2003, she was telling me about some of her roommates. When I asked her how she knew some of the things she knew—had she spoken to them or received an e-mail from them?—she told me she had done neither. She just Googled them. She came up with stuff from high school newspapers, local papers, etc., and fortunately no police records. These are high school kids!

  “In this world you better do it right—you don’t get to pick up and move to the next town so easily,” said Dov Seidman, who runs a legal compliance and business ethics consulting firm, LRN. “In the world of Google, your reputation will follow you and precede you on your next p. 159 stop. It gets there before you do . . . Reputation starts early now. You don’t get to spend four years getting drunk. Your reputation is getting set much earlier in life. ‘Always tell the truth,’ said Mark Twain, ‘that way you won’t have to remember what you said.’ ” So many more people can be private investigators into your life, and they can also share their findings with so many more people.

  In the age of the superpower search, everyone is a celebrity. Google levels information—it has no class boundaries or education boundaries. “If I can operate Google, I can find anything,” said Alan Cohen, vice president of Airespace, which sells wireless technology. “Google is like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere, and God sees everything. Any questions in the world, you ask Google.”

  Some months after Cohen made that observation to me, I came across the following brief business story on CNET News.com: “Search giant Google said on Wednesday that it has acquired Keyhole, a company specializing in Web-based software that allows people to view satellite images from around the globe . . . The software gives users the ability to zoom in from space level; in some cases, it can zoom in all the way to a street-level view. The company does not have high-resolution imagery for the entire globe, but its Website offers a list of cities that are available for more detailed viewing. The company has focused most on covering large metropolitan areas in the United States and is working to expand its coverage.”

  Flattener #10: The Steroids

  Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual

  But this iPaq’s real distinction is its wirelessness. It’s the first palmtop that can connect to the Internet and other gadgets in four wireless ways. For distances up to 30 inches, the iPaq can beam p. 160 information, like your electronic business card, to another palmtop using an infrared transmitter.
For distances up to 30 feet, it has built-in Bluetooth circuitry . . . For distances up to 150 feet, it has a Wi-Fi antenna. And for transmissions around the entire planet, the iPaq has one other trick up its sleeve: it’s also a cell phone. If your office can’t reach you on this, then you must be on the International Space Station.

  —From a New York Times article about HP’s new PocketPC,

  July 29, 2004

  I am on the bullet train speeding southwest from Tokyo to Mishima. The view is spectacular: fishing villages on my left and a snow-dusted Mt. Fuji on my right. My colleague Jim Brooke, the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, is sitting across the aisle and paying no attention to the view. He is engrossed in his computer. So am I, actually, but he’s online through a wireless connection, and I’m just typing away on a column on my unconnected laptop. Ever since we took a cab together the other day in downtown Tokyo and Jim whipped out his wireless-enabled laptop in the backseat and e-mailed me something through Yahoo!, I have been exclaiming at the amazing degree of wireless penetration and connectivity in Japan. Save for a few remote islands and mountain villages, if you have a wireless card in your computer, or any Japanese cell phone, you can get online anywhere—from deep inside the subway stations to the bullet trains speeding through the countryside. Jim knows I am slightly obsessed with the fact that Japan, not to mention most of the rest of the world, has so much better wireless connectivity than America. Anyway, Jim likes to rub it in.

  “See, Tom, I am online right now,” he says, as the Japanese countryside whizzes by. “A friend of mine who’s the Times’s stringer in Alma Ata just had a baby and I am congratulating him. He had a baby girl last night.” Jim keeps giving me updates. “Now I’m reading the frontings!”—a summary of the day’s New York Times headlines. Finally, I ask Jim, who is fluent in Japanese, to ask the train conductor to come over. He ambles by. I ask Jim to ask the conductor how fast we are going. They rattle back and forth in Japanese for a few seconds before Jim translates: “240 kilop. 161meters per hour.” I shake my head. We are on a bullet train going 240 km per hour—that’s 150 mph—and my colleague is answering e-mail from Kazakhstan, and I can’t drive from my home in suburban Washington to downtown DC without my cell phone service being interrupted at least twice. The day before, I was in Tokyo waiting for an appointment with Jim’s colleague Todd Zaun, and he was preoccupied with his Japanese cell phone, which easily connects to the Internet from anywhere. “I am a surfer,” Todd explained, as he used his thumb to manipulate the keypad. “For $3 a month I subscribe to this [Japanese] site that tells me each morning how high the waves are at the beaches near my house. I check it out, and I decide where the best place to surf is that day.”

  (The more I thought about this, the more I wanted to run for president on a one-issue ticket: “I promise, if elected, that within four years America will have as good a cell phone coverage as Ghana, and in eight years as good as Japan—provided that the Japanese sign a standstill agreement and won’t innovate for eight years so we can catch up.” My campaign bumper sticker will be very simple: “Can You Hear Me Now?”)

  I know that America will catch up sooner or later with the rest of the world in wireless technology. It’s already happening. But this section about the tenth flattener is not just about wireless. It is about what I call “the steroids.” I call certain new technologies the steroids because they are amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners. They are taking all the forms of collaboration highlighted in this section—outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, supply-chaining, insourcing, and in-forming—and making it possible to do each and every one of them in a way that is “digital, mobile, virtual, and personal,” as former HP CEO Carly Fiorina put it in her speeches, thereby enhancing each one and making the world flatter by the day.

  By “digital,” Fiorina means that thanks to the PC–Windows– Netscape–work flow revolutions, all analog content and processes—everything from photography to entertainment to communication to word processing to architectural design to the management of my home lawn sprinkler system—are being digitized and therefore can be shaped, manipulated, and transmitted over computers, the Internet, satellites, or fiber-optic cable. By “virtual,” she means that the process of shaping, map. 162nipulating, and transmitting this digitized content can be done at very high speeds, with total ease, so that you never have to think about it—thanks to all the underlying digital pipes, protocols, and standards that have now been installed. By “mobile,” she means that thanks to wireless technology, all this can be done from anywhere, with anyone, through any device, and can be taken anywhere. And by “personal,” she means that it can be done by you, just for you, on your own device.

  What does the flat world look like when you take all these new forms of collaboration and turbocharge them in this way? Let me give just one example. Bill Brody, the president of Johns Hopkins, told me this story in the summer of 2004: “I am sitting in a medical meeting in Vail and the [doctor] giving a lecture quotes a study from Johns Hopkins University. And the guy speaking is touting a new approach to treating prostate cancer that went against the grain of the current surgical method. It was a minimally invasive approach to prostate cancer. So he quotes a study by Dr. Patrick Walsh, who had developed the state-of-the-art standard of care for prostate surgery. This guy who is speaking proposes an alternate method—which was controversial—but he quotes from Walsh’s Hopkins study in a way that supported his approach. When he said that, I said to myself, ‘That doesn’t sound like Dr. Walsh’s study.’ So I had a PDA [personal digital assistant], and I immediately went online [wirelessly] and got into the Johns Hopkins portal and into Medline and did a search right while I was sitting there. Up come all the Walsh abstracts. I toggled on one and read it, and it was not at all what the guy was saying it was. So I raised my hand during the Q and A and read two lines from the abstract, and the guy just turned beet red.”

  The digitization and storage of all the Johns Hopkins faculty research in recent years made it possible for Brody to search it instantly and virtually without giving it a second thought. The advances in wireless technology made it possible for him to do that search from anywhere with any device. And his handheld personal computer enabled him to do that search personally—by himself, just for himself.

  What are the steroids that made all this possible?

  p. 163 One simple way to think about computing, at any scale, is that it is comprised of three things: computational capability, storage capability, and input/output capability—the speed by which information is drawn in and out of the computer/storage complexes. And all of these have been steadily increasing since the days of the first bulky mainframes. This mutually reinforcing progress constitutes a significant steroid. As a result of it, year after year we have been able to digitize, shape, crunch, and transmit more words, music, data, and entertainment than ever before.

  For instance, MIPS stands for “millions of instructions per second,” and it is one measure of the computational capability of a computer’s microchips. In 1971, the Intel 4004 microprocessor produced .06 MIPS, or 60,000 instructions per second. Today’s Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition has a theoretical maximum of 10.8 billion instructions per second. In 1971, the Intel 4004 microprocessor contained 2,300 transistors. Today’s Itanium 2 packs 410 million transistors. Meanwhile, inputting and outputting data have leaped ahead at a staggering rate. At the speeds that disk drives operated back in the early days of 286 and 386 chips, it would have taken about a minute to download a single photo from my latest digital camera. Today I can do that in less than a second on a USB 2.0 disk drive and a Pentium processor. The amount of stuff you can now store to input and output “is off the charts, thanks to the steady advances in storage devices,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief technology officer. “Storage is growing exponentially, and this is really as much a factor in the revolution as anything else.” It’s what is allowing all forms of content to become digital and to some extent por
table. It is also becoming cheap enough that you can put massive amounts on even the personal devices people carry around with them. Five years ago, no one would have believed that you would be able to sell iPods with 40 gigabytes of storage, capable of holding thousands of songs, for prices that teenagers could afford. Now it’s seen as ho-hum. And when it comes to moving all these bits around, the computing world has been turbocharged. Advances in fiber optics will soon allow a single fiber to carry 1 terabit per second. With 48 fibers in a cable, that’s 48 terabits per second. Henry Schacht, the former CEO of Lucent, which specialized in this technology, pointed out that with that much capacity, you could “transmit all the p. 164 printed material in the world in minutes in a single cable. This means unlimited transmitting capacity at zero incremental cost.” Even though the speeds that Schacht was talking about apply only to the backbone of the fiber network, and not that last mile into your house and into your computer, we are still talking about a quantum leap forward.

  In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, I wrote about a 1999 Qwest commercial showing a businessman, tired and dusty, checking in to a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. He asks the bored-looking desk clerk whether they have room service and other amenities. She says yes. Then he asks her whether entertainment is available on his room television, and the clerk answers in a what-do-you-think-you-idiot monotone, “All rooms have every movie ever made in every language, anytime, day or night.” I wrote about that back then as an example of what happens when you get connected to the Internet. Today it is an example of how much you can now get disconnected from the Internet, because in the next few years, as storage continues to advance and become more and more miniaturized, you will be able to buy enough storage to carry many of those movies around in your pocket.