It’s a Flat World, After All… countries like India are now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before and America had better get ready for this.

”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.

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.

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Thomas L. Friedman is the author of ”The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and from which this article is adapted. His column appears on the Op-Ed page of The Times.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?pagewanted=print&position

(Many thanks to Douglas Ormseth of Shortgrass Web Development [email protected] http://www.shortgrass.com 406-268-1115 for passing this along. Doug is looking at starting a networking group similar to the Roundtable in Great Falls. Please contact him if you have an interest. – Russ)