The World Is Flat
I bought the World Is Flat a while ago and started reading it last week. I'm about half way through, but I don't think I can make it to the end.
The first part was okay, but then Friedman started going into his list of factors that "flattened" the world. Examples include the invention of the web browser and rise of the web, outsourcing, search, web 2.0 stuff, etc. Anything vaguely technical (and there's a fair bit - web browsers, tcp-ip, email, Google, P2P) gets a lengthy layman's introduction. To someone entirely unfamiliar with a) the internet and b) the business world in general I'm sure the descriptions are helpful (and necessary), but to me it adds up to a lot of skipped paragraphs (and the occasional cringe when a technical detail is misrepresented for the sake of not confusing people).
Anyway, I thought I'd keep giving it a chance; maybe once the technical explanations were out of the way, there'd be some more insights on the way. So far, though, everything else has been pretty unexciting. What insights there are are spread between innumerable quotations from different interviews of people saying "the world is flat" in different ways.
I think what it comes down to is if you've spent the entirety of the 21st century connected to the internet (and even more so if you've spent those years working in a job that depends on the internet) you likely already take all of the "flatteners" for granted: the level of collaboration that the internet allows isn't a surprise; the speed at which technology is changing is old hat; pretty much everyone in software has spent at least a couple minutes thinking about whether their job could be outsourced to India. The things that Friedman says aren't really anything new if the only business/technology world that you've ever been a part of is the one dating from 2000 through 2006.
According to a lot of the Amazon reviews, the book gets a little more... "prescriptive" near the end (depending on whether the reviwer liked or disliked the book it's either described as "a wakeup call" or "propaganda"). I don't think I'm going to get that far though. Despite the informal writing (or perhaps because of the "meandering prose", depending on your point of view) there just doesn't seem to be enough of interest there to warrant getting through the remaining 250 pages.
The first part was okay, but then Friedman started going into his list of factors that "flattened" the world. Examples include the invention of the web browser and rise of the web, outsourcing, search, web 2.0 stuff, etc. Anything vaguely technical (and there's a fair bit - web browsers, tcp-ip, email, Google, P2P) gets a lengthy layman's introduction. To someone entirely unfamiliar with a) the internet and b) the business world in general I'm sure the descriptions are helpful (and necessary), but to me it adds up to a lot of skipped paragraphs (and the occasional cringe when a technical detail is misrepresented for the sake of not confusing people).
Anyway, I thought I'd keep giving it a chance; maybe once the technical explanations were out of the way, there'd be some more insights on the way. So far, though, everything else has been pretty unexciting. What insights there are are spread between innumerable quotations from different interviews of people saying "the world is flat" in different ways.
I think what it comes down to is if you've spent the entirety of the 21st century connected to the internet (and even more so if you've spent those years working in a job that depends on the internet) you likely already take all of the "flatteners" for granted: the level of collaboration that the internet allows isn't a surprise; the speed at which technology is changing is old hat; pretty much everyone in software has spent at least a couple minutes thinking about whether their job could be outsourced to India. The things that Friedman says aren't really anything new if the only business/technology world that you've ever been a part of is the one dating from 2000 through 2006.
According to a lot of the Amazon reviews, the book gets a little more... "prescriptive" near the end (depending on whether the reviwer liked or disliked the book it's either described as "a wakeup call" or "propaganda"). I don't think I'm going to get that far though. Despite the informal writing (or perhaps because of the "meandering prose", depending on your point of view) there just doesn't seem to be enough of interest there to warrant getting through the remaining 250 pages.