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I think Andreessen touches on what is unique about the flat world and the era of

Globalization 3.0. It is going to be driven by groups and individuals, but of a much

more diverse background than those twelve scientists who made up Andreessen's world

when he created Mosaic. Now we are going to see the real human mosaic emerge-from

all over the world, from left field and right field, from West and East and North

and South-to drive the next generation of innovation. Indeed, a few days after

Andreessen and I talked, the following headline appeared on the front page of The

New York Times (July 15, 2004): "U.S. Permits 3 Cancer Drugs from Cuba." The story

went on to say, "The federal government is permitting a California biotechnology

company to license three experimental cancer drugs from Cuba-making an exception to

the policy of tightly restricting trade with that country."Executives of the company,

CancerVex, said that "it was the first time an American biotechnology company had

obtained permission to license a drug from Cuba, a country that some industry

executives and scientists say is surprisingly strong in

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biotechnology for a developing nation . . . More than $1 billion was spent over the

years to build and operate research institutes on the west side of Havana staffed

by Cuban scientists, many of them educated in Europe."

Just to summarize again: The PC-Windows flattening phase was about me interacting

with my computer and me interacting with my own limited network inside my own company.

Then came along this Internet-e-mail-browser phase, and it flattened the earth a

little bit more. It was about me and my computer interacting with anyone anywhere

on any machine, which is what e-mail is all about, and me and my computer interacting

with anybody's Web site on the Internet, which is what browsing is all about. In short,

the PC-Windows phase begat the Netscape browsing-e-mail phase and the two together

enabled more people to communicate and interact with more other people anywhere on

the planet than ever before.

But the fun was just beginning. This phase was just the foundation for the next step

in flattening the flat world.

Flatten

Work Flow Software

Let's Do Lunch: Have Your Application

Talk to My Application

I met Scott Hyten, the CEO of Wild Brain, a cutting-edge animation studio in San

Francisco that produces films and cartoons for Disney and other major studios, at

a meeting in Silicon Valley in the winter of 2004.1 had been invited by John Doerr,

the venture capitalist, to test out the ideas in this book to a few of the companies

that he was backing. Hyten and I really hit it off, maybe because after hearing my

arguments he wrote me an e-mail that said, "I am sure in Magellan's time there were

plenty of theologians, geographers, and pundits who wanted to make the world flat

again. I know the world is flat, and thank you for your support." A man after my own

heart.

When I asked him to elaborate, Hyten sketched out for me how animated films are

produced today through a global supply chain. I understood immediately why he too

had concluded that the world is flat. "At Wild Brain," he said, "we make something

out of nothing. We learn how to take advantage of the flat world. We are not fighting

it. We are taking advantage of it."

Hyten invited me to come and watch them produce a cartoon segment to really appreciate

how flat the world is, which I did. The series they were working on when I showed

up was for the Disney Channel and called Higglytown Heroes. It was inspired by all

the ordinary people who rose to the challenge of 9/11. Higglytown "is the typical

1950s small town," said Hyten. "It is Pleasantville. And we are exporting the

production of this American small town around the world-literally and figuratively.

The foundation of the story is that every person, all the ordinary people living their

lives, are the heroes in this small town-from the schoolteacher to the pizza delivery

man."

This all-American show is being produced by an all-world supply chain. "The recording

session," explained Hyten, "is located near the artist, usually in New York or L.A.,

the design and direction is done in San Francisco, the writers network in from their

homes (Florida, London, New York, Chicago, LA, and San Francisco), and the animation

of the characters is done in Bangalore with edits from San Francisco. For this show

we have eight teams in Bangalore working in parallel with eight different writers.

This efficiency has allowed us to contract with fifty 'stars' for the twenty-six

episodes. These interactive recording/writing/ animation sessions allow us to record

an artist for an entire show in less than half a day, including unlimited takes and

rewrites. We record two actors per week. For example, last week we recorded Anne Heche

and Smokey Robinson. Technically, we do this over the Internet. We have a VPN [virtual

private network] configured on computers in our offices and on what we call writers'

'footballs,' or special laptop computers that can connect over any cat-5 Ethernet

connection or wireless broadband connection in the 'field.' This VPN allows us to

share the feed from the microphone, images from the session, the real-time script,

and all the animation designs amongst all the locations with a simple log-in. There-

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fore, one way for you to observe is for us to ship you a football. You connect at

home, the office, most hotel rooms, or go down to your local Starbucks [which has

wireless broadband Internet access], log on, put on a pair of Bose noise-reduction

headphones, and listen, watch, read, and comment. 'Sharon, can you sell that line

a little more?' Then, over the eleven-week production schedule for the show, you can

log in twenty-four hours a day and check the progress of the production as it follows

the sun around the world. Technically, you need the 'football' only for the session.

You can use your regular laptop tofollow the 'dailies' and 'edits' over the production

cycle."

I needed to see Wild Brain firsthand, because it is a graphic example of the next

layer of innovation, and the next flattener, that broadly followed on the Berlin

Wall-Windows and Netscape phases. I call this the "work flow phase." When the walls

went down, and the PC, Windows, and Netscape browser enabled people to connect with

other people as never before, it did not take long before all these people who were

connecting wanted to do more than just browse and send e-mail, instant messages,

pictures, and music over this Internet platform. They wanted to shape things, design

things, create things, sell things, buy things, keep track of inventories, do somebody

else's taxes, and read somebody else's X-rays from half a world away. And they wanted

to be able to do any of these things from anywhere to anywhere and from any computer

to any computer-seamlessly. The wall-Windows-Netscape phases paved the way for that

by standardizing the ways words, music, pictures, and data would be digitized and

transported on the Internet-so e-mail and browsing became a very rich experience.

But for all of us to go to the next stage, to get more out of the Internet, the

flattening process had to go another notch. We needed two things. We needed

programmers to come along and write new applications- new software-that would enable

us really to get the maximum from our computers as we worked with these digitized

data, words, music, and pictures and shaped them into products. We also needed more

magic pipes, more transmissions protocols, that would ensure that everyone's software

applications could connect with everyone else's software applications. In short, we

had to go from an Internet that just connected peo74

pie to people, and people to their own applications, to an Internet that could connect

any of my software programs to any of your software programs. Only then could we really

work together.

Think of it this way: In the beginning, work flow consisted of your sales department

taking an order on paper, walking it over to your shipping department, which shipped

the product, and then someone from shipping walking over to billing with a piece of

paper and instructing them to churn out an invoice to the customer. As a result of

the Berlin Wall-Windows-Netscape phases, work flow took a huge leap forward. Now your

sales department could electronically take that order, e-mail it to the shipping

department within your own company, and then have the shipping department send out

the product to the customer and automatically spit out a bill at the same time. The

fact that all the departments within your company were seamlessly interoperable and

that work could flow between them was a great boost to productivity-but this could

happen only if all your company's departments were using the same software and

hardware systems. More often than not, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a company's

sales department was running Microsoft and the inventory department was running

Novell, and they could not communicate with each other. So work did not flow as easily

as it should.

We often forget that the software industry started out like a bad fire department.

Imagine a city where every neighborhood had a different interface for connecting the

fire hose to the hydrant. Everything was fine as long as your neighborhood fire

department could handle your fire. But when a fire became too big, and the fire engines

from the next neighborhood had to be called in, they were useless because they could

not connect their hoses to your hydrants.

For the world to get flat, all your internal departments-sales, marketing,

manufacturing, billing, and inventory-had to become interoperable, no matter what

machines or software each of them was running. And for the world to get really flat,

all your systems had to be interoperable with all the systems of any other company.

That is, your sales department had to be connected to your supplier's inventory

department and your supplier's inventory department had to be seamlessly connected

to its supplier's supplier, which was a factory in China. That way, when you

made a sale, an item was automatically shipped from your supplier's warehouse, and

another item was automatically manufactured by your supplier's supplier, and a bill

was generated from your billing department. The disparate computer systems and

software applications of three distinctly different companies had to be seamlessly

interoperable so that work could flow between them.

In the late 1990s, the software industry began to respond to what its consumers wanted.

Technology companies, through much backroom wrangling and trial and error, started

to forge more common Web-based standards, more integrated digital plumbing and

protocols, so that anyone could fit his hose-his software applications-onto anyone

else's hydrant.

This was a quiet revolution. Technically, what made it possible was the development

of a new data description language, called XML, and its related transport protocol,

called SOAP. IBM, Microsoft, and a host of other companies contributed to the

development of both XML and SOAP, and both were subsequently ratified and popularized

as the Internet standards. XML and SOAP created the technical foundation for software

program-to-software program interaction, which was the foundation for Web-enabled

work flow. They enabled digitized data, words, music, and photos to be exchanged

between diverse software programs so that they could be shaped, designed, manipulated,

edited, reedited, stored, published, and transported-without any regard to where

people are physically sitting or what computing devices they are connecting through.

Once this technical foundation was in place, more and more people started writing

work flow software programs for more and more different tasks. Wild Brain wanted

programs to make animated films with a production team spread out around the world.

Boeing wanted them so that its airplane factories in America could constantly resupply

different airline customers with parts, through its computer ordering systems, no

matter what country those orders came from. Doctors wanted them so that an X-ray taken

in Bangor could be read in a hospital in Bangalore, without the doctor in Maine ever

having to think about what computers that Indian hospital had. And Mom and Dad wanted

them because they wanted their e-banking software, e-brokerage software, office

e-mail, and

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spreadsheet software to all work off their home laptop and be able to interface with

their office desktop. And once everyone's applications started to connect to everyone

else's applications-which took several years and lot of technology and brainpower

to make happen-work could not only flow like never before, but it could be chopped

up and disaggregated like never before and sent to the four corners of the world.

This meant that work could flow anywhere. Indeed, it was the ability to enable

applications to speak to applications, not just people to speak to people, that would

soon make outsourcing possible. Thanks to different kinds of Web services-work flow,

said Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief technology officer, "the industry created a

global platform for a global workforce of people and computers."

The vast network of underground plumbing that made it possible for all this work to

flow has become quite extensive. It includes all the Internet protocols of the

previous era, like TCP/IP and others, which made browsing and e-mail and Web sites

possible. It includes newer tools, like XML and SOAP, which enabled Web applications

to communicate with each other more seamlessly, and it includes software agents known

as middleware, which serves as an intermediary between wildly diverse applications.

The nexus of these technologies has been a huge boon to innovation and a huge reducer