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systems that enable customers to pull on their own, and then responding with lightning

quickness to what they pull. It is so much more efficient.

"Search is so highly personal that searching is empowering for hu-

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mans like nothing else," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "It is the antithesis of being

told or taught. It is about self-empowerment; it is empowering individuals to do what

they think best with the information they want. It is very different from anything

else that preceded it. Radio was one-to-many. TV was one-to-many. The telephone was

one-to-one. Search is the ultimate expression of the power of the individual, using

a computer, looking at the world, and finding exactly what they want- and everyone

is different when it comes to that."

Of course what made Google not just a search engine but a hugely profitable business

was its founders' realization that they could build a targeted advertising model that

would show you ads that are relevant to you when you searched for a specific topic

and then could charge advertisers for the number of times Google users clicked on

their ads. Whereas CBS broadcasts a movie and has a less exact idea who is watching

it or the advertisements, Google knows exactly what you are interested in- after all,

you are searching for it-and can link you up with advertisers directly or indirectly

connected to your searches. In late 2004, Google began a service whereby if you are

walking around Bethesda, Maryland, and are in the mood for sushi, you just send Google

an SMS message on your cell phone that says "Sushi 20817"-the Bethesda zip code-and

it will send you back a text message of choices. Lord only knows where this will go.

In-forming, though, also involves searching for friends, allies, and collaborators.

It is empowering the formation of global communities, across all international and

cultural boundaries, which is another critically important flattening function.

People can now search out fellow collaborators on any subject, project, or

theme-particularly through portals like Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo! has about 300 million

users and 4 million active groups. Those groups have 13 million unique individuals

accessing them each month from all over the world.

"The Internet is growing in the self-services area, and Yahoo! Groups exemplifies

this trend," said Jerry Yang. "It provides a forum, a platform, a set of tools for

people to have private, semiprivate, or public gatherings on the Internet regardless

of geography or time. It enables consumers to gather around topics that are meaningful

to them in ways that are either

impractical or impossible offline. Groups can serve as support groups for complete

strangers who are galvanized by a common issue (coping with rare diseases, first-time

parents, spouses of active-duty personnel) or who seek others who share similar

interests (hobbies as esoteric as dogsled-ding, blackjack, and indoor tanning have

large memberships). Existing communities can migrate online and flourish in an

interactive environment (local kids' soccer league, church youth group, alumni

organizations), providing a virtual home for groups interested in sharing, organizing,

and communicating information valuable to cultivating vibrant communities. Some

groups exist only online and could never be as successful offline, while others mirror

strong real-world communities. Groups can be created instantaneously and dissolved;

topics can change or stay constant. This trend will only grow as consumers

increasingly become publishers, and they can seek the affinity and community they

choose-when, where, and how they choose it."

There is another side to in-forming that people are going to have to get used to,

and that is other people's ability to in-form themselves about you from a very early

age. Search engines flatten the world by eliminating all the valleys and peaks, all

the walls and rocks, that people used to hide inside of, atop, behind, or under in

order to mask their reputations or parts of their past. In a flat world, you can't

run, you can't hide, and smaller and smaller rocks are turned over. Live your life

honestly, because whatever you do, whatever mistakes you make, will be searchable

one day. The flatter the world becomes, the more ordinary people become

transparent-and available. Before my daughter Orly went off to college in the fall

of 2003, she was telling me about some of her roommates. When I asked her how she

knew some of the things she knew- had she spoken to them or received an e-mail from

them?-she told me she had done neither. She just Googled them. She came up with stuff

from high school newspapers, local papers, etc., and fortunately no police records.

These are high school kids!

"In this world you better do it right-you don't get to pick up and move to the next

town so easily," said Dov Seidman, who runs a legal compliance and business ethics

consulting firm, LRN. "In the world of Google, your reputation will follow you and

precede you on your next

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stop. It gets there before you do ... Reputation starts early now. You don't get to

spend four years getting drunk. Your reputation is getting set much earlier in life.

'Always tell the truth,' said Mark Twain, 'that way you won't have to remember what

you said.'" So many more people can be private investigators into your life, and they

can also share their findings with so many more people.

In the age of the superpower search, everyone is a celebrity. Google levels

information-it has no class boundaries or education boundaries. "If I can operate

Google, I can find anything," said Alan Cohen, vice president of Airespace, which

sells wireless technology. "Google is like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere,

and God sees everything. Any questions in the world, you ask Google."

Some months after Cohen made that observation to me, I came across the following brief

business story on CNET News.com: "Search giant Google said on Wednesday that it has

acquired Keyhole, a company specializing in Web-based software that allows people

to view satellite images from around the globe . . . The software gives users the

ability to zoom in from space level; in some cases, it can zoom in all the way to

a street-level view. The company does not have high-resolution imagery for the entire

globe, but its Website offers a list of cities that are available for more detailed

viewing. The company has focused most on covering large metropolitan areas in the

United States and is working to expand its coverage."

Flattener #10

The Steroids

Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual

But this iPaq's real distinction is its wirelessness. It's the first palmtop that

can connect to the Internet and other gadgets in four wireless ways. For distances

up to 30 inches, the iPaq can beam

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information, like your electronic business card, to another palmtop using an infrared

transmitter. For distances up to 30 feet, it has built-in Bluetooth circuitry . . .

For distances up to 150 feet, it has a Wi-Fi antenna. And for transmissions around

the entire planet, the iPaq has one other trick up its sleeve: it's also a cell phone.

If your office can't reach you on this, then you must be on the International Space

Station.

-From a New York Times article about HP's new PocketPC,

July 29, 2004

I am on the bullet train speeding southwest from Tokyo to Mishima. The view is

spectacular: fishing villages on my left and a snow-dusted Mt. Fuji on my right. My

colleague Jim Brooke, the Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, is sitting across

the aisle and paying no attention to the view. He is engrossed in his computer. So

am I, actually, but he's online through a wireless connection, and I'm just typing

away on a column on my unconnected laptop. Ever since we took a cab together the other

day in downtown Tokyo and Jim whipped out his wireless-enabled laptop in the backseat

and e-mailed me something through Yahoo!, I have been exclaiming at the amazing degree

of wireless penetration and connectivity in Japan. Save for a few remote islands and

mountain villages, if you have a wireless card in your computer, or any Japanese cell

phone, you can get online anywhere-from deep inside the subway stations to the bullet

trains speeding through the countryside. Jim knows I am slightly obsessed with the

fact that Japan, not to mention most of the rest of the world, has so much better

wireless connectivity than America. Anyway, Jim likes to rub it in.

"See, Tom, I am online right now," he says, as the Japanese countryside whizzes by.

"A friend of mine who's the Times's stringer in Alma Ata just had a baby and I am

congratulating him. He had a baby girl last night." Jim keeps giving me updates. "Now

I'm reading the frontings!" -a summary ofthe day's New York Times headlines. Finally,

I ask Jim, who is fluent in Japanese, to ask the train conductor to come over. He

ambles by. I ask Jim to ask the conductor how fast we are going. They rattle back

and forth in Japanese for a few seconds before Jim translates: "240 kilo

meters per hour." I shake my head. We are on a bullet train going 240 km per hour-that's

150 mph-and my colleague is answering e-mail from Kazakhstan, and I can't drive from

my home in suburban Washington to downtown DC without my cell phone service being

interrupted at least twice. The day before, I was in Tokyo waiting for an appointment

with Jim's colleague Todd Zaun, and he was preoccupied with his Japanese cell phone,

which easily connects to the Internet from anywhere. "I am a surfer," Todd explained,

as he used his thumb to manipulate the keypad. "For $3 a month I subscribe to this

[Japanese] site that tells me each morning how high the waves are at the beaches near

my house. I check it out, and I decide where the best place to surf is that day."

(The more I thought about this, the more I wanted to run for president on a one-issue

ticket: "I promise, if elected, that within four years America will have as good a

cell phone coverage as Ghana, and in eight years as good as Japan-provided that the

Japanese sign a standstill agreement and won't innovate for eight years so we can

catch up." My campaign bumper sticker will be very simple: "Can You Hear Me Now?")

I know that America will catch up sooner or later with the rest of the world in wireless

technology. It's already happening. But this section about the tenth flattener is

not just about wireless. It is about what I call "the steroids." I call certain new

technologies the steroids because they are amplifying and turbocharging all the other

flatteners. They are taking all the forms of collaboration highlighted in this

section- outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, supply-chaining, insourcing, and

in-forming-and making it possible to do each and every one of them in a way that is

"digital, mobile, virtual, and personal," as former HP CEO Carly Fiorina put it in

her speeches, thereby enhancing each one and making the world flatter by the day.

By "digital," Fiorina means that thanks to the PC-Windows-Netscape-work flow

revolutions, all analog content and processes- everything from photography to

entertainment to communication to word processing to architectural design to the

management of my home lawn sprinkler system-are being digitized and therefore can

be shaped, manipulated, and transmitted over computers, the Internet, satellites,

or fiber-optic cable. By "virtual," she means that the process of shaping, ma162

nipulating, and transmitting this digitized content can be done at very high speeds,

with total ease, so that you never have to think about it-thanks to all the underlying

digital pipes, protocols, and standards that have now been installed. By "mobile,"

she means that thanks to wireless technology, all this can be done from anywhere,

with anyone, through any device, and can be taken anywhere. And by "personal," she

means that it can be done by you, just for you, on your own device.

What does the flat world look like when you take all these new forms of collaboration

and turbocharge them in this way? Let me give just one example. Bill Brody, the

president of Johns Hopkins, told me this story in the summer of 2004: "I am sitting

in a medical meeting in Vail and the [doctor] giving a lecture quotes a study from

Johns Hopkins University. And the guy speaking is touting a new approach to treating

prostate cancer that went against the grain of the current surgical method. It was

a minimally invasive approach to prostate cancer. So he quotes a study by Dr. Patrick

Walsh, who had developed the state-of-the-art standard of care for prostate surgery.

This guy who is speaking proposes an alternate method-which was controversial-but

he quotes from Walsh's Hopkins study in a way that supported his approach. When he

said that, I said to myself, That doesn't sound like Dr. Walsh's study.' So I had

a PDA [personal digital assistant], and I immediately went online [wirelessly] and

got into the Johns Hopkins portal and into Medline and did a search right while I

was sitting there. Up come all the Walsh abstracts. I toggled on one and read it,

and it was not at all what the guy was saying it was. So I raised my hand during the

Q and A and read two lines from the abstract, and the guy just turned beet red."

The digitization and storage of all the Johns Hopkins faculty research in recent years

made it possible for Brody to search it instantly and virtually without giving it

a second thought. The advances in wireless technology made it possible for him to

do that search from anywhere with any device. And his handheld personal computer

enabled him to do that search personally-by himself, just for himself.

What are the steroids that made all this possible?