Module 3

            In this module Friedman talks about more “Flatteners.” In the first part he talks about offshoring and what the difference between offshoring and outsourcing. The second part is about what a supply chain is and what the advantages they have. The last part is about how Google has affected business.

            Offshoring is shifting the location of a service or production to a location abroad (over shores.) For example if you have a company here in Utah and you have someone writing code for you over in India. Offshoring is very similar to outsourcing because they have the same concept. However the difference between the two is that outsourcing can be to someone that just doesn’t work for the company. For example using a contractor do use a job would be considered outsourcing because they are in the same country, yet they are still aren’t employed by the company. 

            Supply chains are a system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. They transform natural resources, raw materials, and components into a finished product that is delivered to the end customer. The way it works with Wal-Mart is when you’re buying things there as soon as the cashier scans it a signal will go off that lets the supplier know that they need  to make more. They like to call it “the Wal-Mart Symphony” in multiple movements with no finale. The supply chain is running at all times and never stops. There is no bigger supply chain than Wal-Mart. They move 2.3 billion in general merchandise a year. There isn’t going to be someone that is going to put Wal-Mart out of business because starting a huge supply chain like that is not easy. The only way that they would go out of business is that the stock market crashed and they had to go under because of it. Even after that it would take a long time for a company to start a big supply chain like that again.

            Google is such a big part of today’s society. They made it possible to find something on the internet without exactly know what you need to do to find it. In the book they used an example of how this guy met a friend and another guy at a restaurant (for a date I’m guessing). He was worried about the guy that they met with so he looked him up on a Google search and found out that he was arrested for a felony assault. So he was able to warn his friend about the guy because of google. Google is the most widely used search engine. I know that at my job alone I use Google at least fifty times a day. I’m sure that my coworkers are in the same boat. It’s almost hard to imagine a world without it especially because of how much I use it in a day.

            In this module Friedman finished off his “Flatteners” talking about offshoring and going into how it’s different from outsourcing. He also talked about how supply chains like Wal-Mart are huge part of today’s society. Lastly was about Google and why that is so important. 

Module 2

This module was about the Flattener number three through number five. Flattener number three was about workflow software and what it is. Flattener number four is about open source software and how it’s important. Flattener is about outsourcing and why it’s so important in today’s society.   

            Work flow software is what helps employees stay on task and keep track of what they need to be doing. It can be very useful so that employers know that their employees are getting their work done and they aren't stealing company time. An example of this would be at my job I work for a small software company called Reading Horizons. We use a work flow software called Pivotal Tracker. It’s very useful because it makes us know exactly what upper management wants and when they want it done by. Usually work flow software is very easy to use and is very beneficial to the company because you can do things like tasks and projects. Before this I imagine that it was really easy for employees that worked in this field it was very easy to steal time from the company.

            Open source software is software that can be freely used by anyone. Usually open source software is made by a lot of people and distributed under licenses that comply with open source. Open source in my opinion is very important because it’s free. Anything that is free now-a-days is very important especially software because usually when a company wants to build a software it takes a lot of hours, people, and can be very costly. With open source software it makes it so that companies don’t have to spend all that money on it. At my work right now I’m actually looking for a good open source time sheet. If I don’t find a good open source one then I’ll have to build it myself and that will cost my company a lot of my hours worked rather than it being free from an open source.

            The definition of outsourcing is to obtain goods or service from an outside or foreign supplier. In the developing world outsourcing is very important because a company can hire someone to come into their office every day and pay them a lot of money, or they can outsource and hire someone that lives in India and pay them close to nothing to do the exact same job. Luckily my work doesn’t out source and we have a full development team in our office. I’m very glad that my work isn’t seeing that the world is flat and outsourcing when they easily could be getting the same product for much cheaper from somewhere else.

            In this module Friedman is still showing us how the world is flattening and just giving us more reasons. With workflow and how it’s keeping employees on task, open source software that is saving companies a lot of money, and outsourcing which is companies hiring people from outside countries to do the same job for much cheaper.

Module 1

               In the first part it talks about how Friedman how the world is becoming flat because of globalization and what the difference between Globalization 1.0 differs from Globalization 2.0 and Globalization 3.0. In the Flattener number one it’s about the New Age of Creativity and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and why that was so important to him. In the Flattener number two it’s about the New Age of Connectivity and why Netscape going public was so important.

            Globalization 1.0 was from 1492 to about 1800. Globalization 2.0 was from about 1800 to about 2000. Globalization 3.0 is from 2000 to present day. There are some similarities between the three. For example all of them “shrank the world” in a sense that they all made it easier for everyone to trade goods, or just communicate in general. But they are all different from each other. Globalization 1.0 makes the world go from large to medium, Globalization 2.0 makes the world go from medium to small, and Globalization 3.0 makes the world go from small to tiny.

In 1.0 the force driving the global integration was brawn. So basically if you had the money and power you had the head start on being the best. For countries that didn’t have the money they would be way behind the bigger counties. In 2.0 the force of driving the global integration was multinational companies. The industrial Revolution was the main reason that 2.0 started. There were better ways to travel, communicate. In 3.0 the force of driving the global integration was the unique character. As Friedman explains it helped even the playing field to other smaller counties. When I say smaller countries I don’t mean population wise I mean smaller as in technology. In 2000 computers started to become cheaper and more accessible to everyone. Because everyone has computers they all can talk to each other instantly even if they are in a different country or sitting ten feet away from them.     

            The Berlin wall coming down was important because it was a symbol that the cold war was over. To Friedman it was important because it made it possible for the people on the other side of the wall join the economic mainstream instead of them being locked out because of the wall.

            The story of the Netscape is important because the Web broadened the users for the Internet. It made it so that everyone could use it instead of just for computer nerds.  They made it possible to communicate through the internet and so that everyone would want or need a computer if they wanted to move forward in society.

            Friedman showed how the world is actually getting smaller because it’s easy to get something from the United States to China just from over the internet when back before 1492 they didn’t even know that North America even existed. The world just keeps getting smaller and smaller. Who knows where our technology will take us in the future.