The World Is Flat
Listened to this book on my ride in to work today. Working though it. The whole book has a childish tone. I'm tired of hearing him replace "competition" with "collaboration." They are not the same. Tired of him replacing "vertical integration" with "horizontal integration." Integrating with a supplier in China is not horizontal, it is vertical, no matter how much you want it to fit with your book's theme.
Also - Friedman missed a major point. The ultimate objective of "flattening" is not just to allocate the basic tasks to the cheapest source of human labor (China, India). It is to remove the necessity of human labor from the most basic tasks. In Friedman's world basic tasks are all taken over by China/India and Europeans/Americans risk loosing jobs. He is ignorant of the fact that the lowest cost labor is no labor. Google search is not 1,000,000 Indians searching through the web, it is a bunch of code and data centers. Make the world "flat." Make it rich. Then we will all be able to move up to higher-paying, more value-added knowledge worker or experienced tradesman jobs.
Other than that, I really like the book, and like the way it really shows the big picture.
Also - Friedman missed a major point. The ultimate objective of "flattening" is not just to allocate the basic tasks to the cheapest source of human labor (China, India). It is to remove the necessity of human labor from the most basic tasks. In Friedman's world basic tasks are all taken over by China/India and Europeans/Americans risk loosing jobs. He is ignorant of the fact that the lowest cost labor is no labor. Google search is not 1,000,000 Indians searching through the web, it is a bunch of code and data centers. Make the world "flat." Make it rich. Then we will all be able to move up to higher-paying, more value-added knowledge worker or experienced tradesman jobs.
Other than that, I really like the book, and like the way it really shows the big picture.
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