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.