Module 3

According to Thomas L. Friedman offshoring is when a company moves one of their factory’s from one country to another to avoid higher taxes, insurance, and overall production costs. Offshoring in my opinion is a win-win for both the company and the country it has moved to.  It is beneficial to the company for obvious reasons of lower costs.  It is also beneficial to the probably less advanced country it moved to because it is giving people from their jobs.  I only say “less advanced country” because I assume if the company is looking for lower expenses that they wouldn’t go to a more advanced country.  Now outsourcing is when you take a small portion of your business and hire another company to do it for you.  An example of this would be maybe something like a call center.  Say the business doesn’t want to deal with the hassle of it, they can hire an another business to do it for them and just pay them a certain fee or percentage per month. In hindsight offshoring is moving business or factory into another country and outsourcing is more like spreading out your business. Both give a lot more people jobs compared to if companies didn’t use offshoring or outsourcing. 

A supply chain in a way is a products life story from the beginning to the end. It is a network of producers, suppliers, distributors, and retailers. It starts off with a simple idea of the product and ends with you buying it. A supply chain makes it so that many companies can work together in the supply chain process by everyone doing their part.  Wal-Mart uses supply chain to their advantage and are very smart about how they use it, in fact companies will compete to be part of Wal-Marts’ supply chain.  Everyone want’s to be a part of it because of the high profits they will get in return, and with many competitors Wal-Mart is able to get the lowest prices from them.  Thats how we get such low prices from Wal-Mart! They are able to keep track of what sells best and where, and when they need more of a product the message heads back down the supply chain.  This is why you almost never see an empty shelf at Wal-Mart, because they are able to keep it continuously restocked.

Google has changed the world forever.  If you have access to the internet then you have access to Google.  Google has all the information and entertainment you could ever search for. Even by just typing in a few keywords into Googles search bar can give you endless pages of information. Google has affected business in many ways.  One way would be Gmail, a free web based e-mail service.  You can have different groups set so you only have to send an email once and not to every individual of the company. With Google+ you can create your own profile and connect with other coworkers and share documents, photos, and other media. The public can also find out a lot about a business by just Googling them.  The business doesn’t even necessarily have to have their own page, Google will bring up anything related to that business. Having a website for your business is a good idea I think.  That way it isn’t information from others, it is information from the business directly. 

Module Two

As we read further into The World Is Flat the more I am realizing how “flat” we actually are.  Although there is still much more to learn.  Technology is making our daily lives a breeze.  Workflow is just one example of that.  Workflow allows information to be passed between parties, people from all over to collaborate, spellcheck, dictionary, filtering your email, you can even be someones online friend.  Ever heard of online dating?  The basic concept is to make our internet use run a lot more smoother.  An example of workflow that I like to use is Skype.  Communication is a very important part of workflow, and Skype does just that.  It allows people from anywhere in the world to talk with one another.   For example, if you have an important meeting in Paris, France then you may video or voice call into the meeting and you are technically attending it.  Before softwares such as Skype, you would have to travel from place to place to attend such meetings.  Workflow software has made everything easier to do, rather then taking a lot of effort and time to do them as we did in the past.  It has taken an impact on many different fields.  Education, government, entertainment, art, literature, science, and more.

Open source software is basically free community created software from my understanding.  Websites like Wikipedia and Ehow, allowing the community of online users to share information and add it to the site for free.  Anyone can create websites or add to existing open source websites.  No wonder it is also known as community developed software.  You can upload a video of an elephant riding a bicycle backwards on Youtube for anyone to see and anyone to leave comments.  You can add synonyms to a thesaurus to help others to find a different word for their essay.   You can even upload your grandmothers secret receipt for apple pie to a cooking website so everyone can get in on the secret.  The point is, there is so much we can do to be our own authors or contributors using open source software. Rather than just being a consumer, we are able to get others opinions on ideas. 

Outsourcing is something we use all the time!  It is defined as obtaining goods or service from an outside supplier.  A company might send their work to a foreign country for it to be finished by workers there, and then sent back to the company in a very short period of time.  Outsourcing seems to make work a lot easier.  Although it would not be possible without workflow and open source software to to share and collaborate with others.  And the best part is that you can be anywhere in the world and share or receive information from anyone else anywhere.  Something that shocked me was that people are working from their homes for a company that is based across the country.  Some companies have workers that work from there desk at their home and still manage to do the same amount of work (or even more in some cases) then they would if they were actually there!  Workflow software, outsourcing, and open source software have definitely made society a more efficient and a “flatter” place to live.

Module 1

Thomas L. Friedman seems to have a deep understanding of globalization, making the world smaller in a sense that we can connect with one another around the world.  He discusses globalization in three eras, the effects from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a story of Netscape and the impact it has on us.

First I’d like to discuss the three phases of globalization.  How he put it, globalization 1.0 took place early on in the countries of the world.  The world was changing and the key too it was how much muscle and steam power your country had and how you could deploy it.  The focus of globalization 1.0 was countries them selves globalizing.  People were looking to collaborate or compete with others threw their country.  Religion and Imperialism had a big influence on the government.  In the modern day our focuses on globalizing are much different. 

Furthermore was globalization 2.0, where the main focus was on globalizing companies.  This era was from the 1800s until 2000.  In Friedman’s words “this era shrank the world from a size medium to a size small.”  This is because multi national companies.  In the early years the era was powered by very low transportation cost because of the steam engine and rail road.  The second half telecommunication was invented in many forms making it easier to communicate. Inventions such as the telegraph, telephone, and Internet are some examples.

Globalization 3.0 if the era we are in now.  This era is advancing so quickly it has changed the future dramatically.  In my opinion, for the better.  It’s not only for the countries and companies to further themselves, but also for individuals such as your self.  Information and entertainment is easy access to the common man.  It empowers people to be independent and see themselves in competition with the world.  Most companies want to be the best, and now days it is easier then ever to work together with any one on the globe to be the best.

The fall of the Berlin Wall affected the entire world.  Friedman said it was very surprising to everyone.  In my opinion it was a great thing, it really evened the playing fiend in a since. Germany was no longer isolated from the rest of the world. Democracy became popular.  In result authority influences lost some of their power.  For example I’d like to think of when you are doing a group project, and one student or coworker really just separates themselves from the rest of the group.  It isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when that person comes around and is wanting to interact and cooperate, it makes the whole group feel more at ease.

Lastly discussed was the impact Netscape had on the world.  Netscape was the first invented website browser.  A man named Jim Barksdale created an application that could connect modems around the world.  Netscape was sort of one of the first stepping stones to reaching our modern technology we use today.  We use the Internet to connect, educate, entertain, and so much more.  Now days there are browsers to choose from such as Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, ext. I’d like to think of Netscape as the grandfather of these.  In first world countries we use the Internet for everything, and third world countries are almost to that point as well.