Thursday, January 26, 2012


I personally thought that Tom Friedman’s speech was very interesting. When listening to him explain how the world was flat I thought that perhaps he was crazy. Then he explained how advanced our technology is today making us able to connect with anyone around the world. It then made sense to me that the world is flat because we are able to do things across the country in a matter of seconds. Tom then explained the flatteners that caused our world to be flat. He explained ten different ones, and I choose two that I thought were most important.

            The first flattener that I thought was extremely important was the 8/9/95 which was when Netscape went public. Now I don’t really know too much about it except that it was the first browser to be public to all people with the internet. I would agree however that this would be the foundation of what really made our world flat. This browser gave us the ability to search for all the information that was out there. Also this allowed so many others to create things with the internet and make so many technological advances that we have today. Also when it was released they made sure that no companies would be able to dominate it so that it was available for everyone. Also another great outcome of the release was that it triggered that .com boom. This allowed for so many new and exciting technological advances that we are a part of today.

            The second flattener that I thought was also very valuable was the work flow error. I would also say that this flattener coincides with the previous flattener I mentioned with Netscape. In this flattener Tom describes how all companies were currently on the internet but were unable to communicate with other departments. For example he mentioned that Yale’s admissions department was unable to connect with applications from Yale’s accounting department. In this flattener people were now able to share information with other people’s applications. This allowed for companies to see for example a spreadsheet from the accounting department even if you worked in the admissions department.


1 comment:

  1. Very good blog about Toms theory's. His video on the matter was very interesting to me and I can see it was for you also. Tom did a lot of research on his theory and it shows in his speech. After listening to him talk about the world is flat it made me think...is the world actually in fact flat in a way? His reasoning on the Berlin gate Bridge was especially interesting. Well this was a very good blog keep up the good work!!

    ReplyDelete