Is the World Flat?

I just finished reading "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman, the most famous columinst in America today. The book is so interesting and I would recommend this book to everyone regardless of their profession.

He did an excellent job in explaining the 10 things which flattened the world in last 15 years. He described how these flattening things are helping to improve the standard of life and at the same time how the bad guys are using these flattening things to deteriorate the world.

1. The fall of the Berlin wall on 11/9/89
2. The Netscape IPO on 8/9/95
3. Workflow
4. Oursourcing
5. Offshoring
6. Open Sourcing
7. Supply Chain
8. Insourcing
9. Informing
10. Steroids

However, in my view except the 1st one the rest of them are technological advancements in 21st century and these technical advancements are helping to evolve the flattning of world. So I would say that it just started evolving and it has not yet flattened the world. Still the geographic location does matter for business and face-to-face communcation has its own value. Most of the countries in Africa and Middle-East are not joined the flat world. They are still disconnected from the rest of the world. These technological advancements alone are not enough to bring them into the flat world. May be we need revolutionary political leaders at both local and international level to bring them into flat earth society.

For instance, the Oursourcing and Offshoring flattners have raised the standard of living for few millions, fraction of the total population, in India and China, both countries have total population of more than 2 billion.

There was an article from Wall Street Journal last week about H1B quota increase. Both Bill Gates and Scott Mcnelly were in favor of increasing the visa quota because they still need more poeple locally here at their headquarters rather than working remotely from India or some other countries.

Another article in Buiness week June,2006 issue, 'Why Apple logged out of India'.

http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2006/jun/15apple.htm

I shall continue...