This week’s reading of Friedman’s book has been more positive for me. Once it was back onto a track of looking at the past and predicting the future, instead of focusing on the present, I began to enjoy the book once again. My thoughts on this section of reading were consistently something to the effect of, “That makes total sense!” or “I’m thinking the same thing.”
The triple convergence was a subject that I was very agreeable on. The triple convergence is the concept that, although all the flatteners existed, it still took time for companies to develop themselves to be able to take advantage of them. For example, workflow software, although it has been around for years, took several years to distribute and be seen by companies as a tool they could use to improve their businesses. Once distributed though those systems had to be learned by the employees to allow them to be effective.
I still see people who can’t use their company’s systems effectively because they haven’t been given proper training or been flexible enough during the assimilation of computers into their workplace. At times I’ve had the opportunity to step in, look at a company’s system as a user, and been able to pick up on it easily where others have struggled. I’ve grown up with these (what changes) changes in technology constantly around me and been forced to become flexible and adapt to those changes. While most of the work force we have today just became introduced to the computer world, they have yet to adjust to be flexible enough to deal with the constant change.
The development and assimilation of computers has ramped up the threat of theft of intellectual property. Before computers, intellectual property was a challenge to steal. Someone would have to infiltrate a company and then send out information about ideas manually. Intellectual property is anything that one person could think of and gain rights over an intangible idea. Today anything on a computer is potentially accessible if you have the right hands and mind. As people begin developing plans to create a product they input those ideas into a computer system. Thereafter, someone with the skills and a minor knowledge of what they were looking for could look into that person’s computer and pull any intellectual property and attempt to develop it before the original or sell the ideas. This is a major concern for companies and has most likely caused the downfall of many. The challenge of these types of cases is to glean who actually had the idea first. Patents have become a minor solution to this problem.
However, patents have their own problems. We have all seen over the last few years massive “Patent Wars.” One of the major patent wars going on is between Samsung and Apple. They have been going back and forth for over a year now over a few of Samsung’s products copying the design and some of the patented technologies from Apple’s iPhone and vice versa. This has been a very active debate among the technical communities, whom already have a heated debate going on over Samsung and Apple in-general on top of the patent wars. In the case of Apple vs. Samsung, many of the complications have come from them being multinational companies as well as being headquartered in 2 different countries.
One conflict that was brought up in Friedman’s book was the case of India and Indiana. Indiana was looking to upgrade their unemployment computer systems. Many companies gave bids on the project. A company in India gave a bid that was 8.1 million dollars under any other company and won the contract. As the India company went to work, Indiana elected a new governor. The contract with the India company came to the public eye and the new government made a decision to break the contract.
Friedman asks the question as to whether India or Indiana was being exploited and who was the exploiter. To answer this question, you have to look at it as a flat world vs a round world. In the round world I would have to say Indiana was exploiting India for the cheap labor and the ability to come in to do the work for a lot less than any other company. But in a flat world I would say no one is being exploited. The Indian company came in and placed their bid at what they were able and willing to do the work. They took their market advantage and used it to their benefit. Indiana was in no way forcing them to bid. Indiana didn’t seek out the cheapest way to complete the task, they put the job out there and when a company got a hold of the information, they came to Indiana to put in their bid to see if they could get the job.
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