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if I had to point to one factor as first among equals, itwas the information revolution

that began in the early-to mid-1980s. Totalitarian systems depend on a monopoly of

information and force, and too much information started to slip through the Iron

Curtain, thanks to the spread of fax machines, telephones, and other modern tools

of communication.

A critical mass of IBM PCs, and the Windows operating system that brought them to

life, came together in roughly this same time period that the wall fell, and their

diffusion put the nail in the coffin of communism, because they vastly improved

horizontal communication-to the detriment of the exclusively top-down form that

communism was based upon. They also greatly enhanced personal information gathering

and personal empowerment. (Each component of this information revolu

tion was brought about by separate evolutions: The phone network evolved from the

desire of people to talk to each other over long distances. The fax machine evolved

as a way to transmit written communication over the phone network. The PC was diffused

by the original killer apps-spreadsheets and word processing. And Windows evolved

out of the need to make all of this usable, and programmable, by the masses.)

The first IBM PC hit the markets in 1981. At the same time, many computer scientists

around the world had started using these things called the Internet and e-mail. The

first version of the Windows operating system shipped in 1985, and the real

breakthrough version that made PCs truly user-friendly-Windows 3.0-shipped on May

22, 1990, only six months after the wall went down. In this same time period, some

people other than scientists started to discover that if they bought a PC and a dial-up

modem, they could connect their PCs to their telephones and send e-mails through

private Internet service providers-like CompuServe and America Online.

"The diffusion of personal computers, fax machines, Windows, and dial-up modems

connected to a global telephone network all came together in the late 1980s and early

1990s to create the basic platform that started the global information revolution,"

argued Craig J. Mundie, the chief technology officer for Microsoft. The key was the

melding of them all together into a single interoperable system. That happened, said

Mundie, once we had in crude form a standardized computing platform-the IBM PC-along

with a standardized graphical user interface for word processing and

spreadsheets-Windows-along with a standardized tool for communication-dial-up

modems and the global phone network. Once we had that basic interoperable platform,

then the killer applications drove its diffusion far and wide.

"People found that they really liked doing all these things on a computer, and they

really improved productivity," said Mundie. "They all had broad individual appeal

and made individual people get up and buy a Windows-enabled PC and put it on their

desk, and that forced the diffusion of this new platform into the world of corporate

computing even more. People said, 'Wow, there is an asset here, and we should take

advantage of it.'"

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The more established Windows became as the primary operating system, added Mundie,

"the more programmers went out and wrote applications for rich-world businesses to

put on their computers, so they could do lots of new and different business tasks,

which started to enhance productivity even more. Tens of millions of people around

the world became programmers to make the PC do whatever they wanted in their own

languages. Windows was eventually translated into thirty-eight languages. People

were able to become familiar with the PC in their own languages."

This was all new and exciting, but we shouldn't forget how constricted this early

PC-Windows-modem platform was. "This platform was constrained by too many

architectural limits," said Mundie. "There was missing infrastructure." The Internet

as we know it today-with seemingly magical transmission protocols that can connect

everyone and everything-had not yet emerged. Back then, networks had only very basic

protocols for exchangingfiles and e-mail messages. Sopeople who were using computers

with the same type of operating systems and software could exchange documents through

e-mail orfile transfers, but even doing this was tricky enough that only the computing

elite took the trouble. You couldn't just sit down and zap an e-mail or a file to

anyone anywhere-especially outside your own company or outside your own Internet

service-the way you can today. Yes, AOL users could communicate withCompuServe users,

but it was neither simple nor reliable. As a result, said Mundie, a huge amount of

data and creativity was accumulating in all those computers, but there was no easy,

interoperable way to share it and mold it. People could write new applications that

allowed selected systems to work together, but in general this was limited to planned

exchanges between PCs within the network of a single company.

This period from 11/9 to the mid-1990s still led to a huge advance in personal

empowerment, even if networks were limited. It was the age of "Me and my machine can

now talk to each other better and faster, so that I personally can do more tasks"

and the age of "Me and my machine can now talk to a few friends and some other people

in my company better and faster, so we can become more productive." The walls had

fallen and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it

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had ever been-but the age of seamless global communication had not dawned.

Though we didn't notice it, there was a discordant note in this exciting new era.

It wasn't only Americans and Europeans who joined the people of the Soviet Empire

in celebrating the fall of the wall-and claming credit for it. Someone else was raising

a glass-not of champagne but of thick Turkish coffee. His name was Osama bin Laden

and he had a different narrative. His view was that it was the jihadi fighters in

Afghanistan, of which he was one, who had brought down the Soviet Empire by forcing

the Red Army to withdraw from Afghanistan (with some help from U.S. and Pakistani

forces). And once that mission had been accomplished- the Soviets completed their

pullout from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, just nine months before the fall of

the Berlin Wall-bin Laden looked around and found that the other superpower, the

United States, had a huge presence in his own native land, Saudi Arabia, the home

of the two holiest cities in Islam. And he did not like it.

So, while we were dancing on the wall and opening up our Windows and proclaiming that

there was no ideological alternative left to free-market capitalism, bin Laden was

turning his gun sights on America. Both bin Laden and Ronald Reagan saw the Soviet

Union as the "evil empire," but bin Laden came to see America as evil too. He did

have an ideological alternative to free-market capitalism-political Islam. He did

not feel defeated by the end of the Soviet Union; he felt emboldened by it. He did

not feel attracted to the widened playing field; he felt repelled by it. And he was

not alone. Some thought that Ronald Reagan brought down the wall by bankrupting the

Soviet Union through an arms race; others thought IBM, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates

brought down the wall by empowering individuals to download the future. But a world

away, in Muslim lands, many thought bin Laden and his comrades brought down the Soviet

Empire and the wall with religious zeal, and millions of them were inspired to upload

the past.

In short, while we were celebrating 11/9, the seeds of another memorable

date-9/11-were being sown. But more about that later in the book. For now, let the

flattening continue.

Flattener #2

8/9/95 When Netscape Went Public

By the mid-1990s, the PC-Windows network revolution had reached its limits. If the

world was going to become really interconnected, and really start to flatten out,

the revolution needed to go to the next phase. And the next phase, notes Microsoft's

Mundie, "was to go from a PC-based computing platform to an Internet-based platform."

The killer applications that drove this new phase were e-mail and Internet browsing.

E-mail was being driven by the rapidly expanding consumer portals like AOL, CompuServe,

and eventually MSN.But it was the new killer app, the Webbrowser-which could retrieve

documents or Web pages stored on Internet Web sites and display them on any computer

screen-that really captured the imagination. The actual concept of the World Wide

Web-a system for creating, organizing, and linking documents so they could be easily

browsed-was created by British computer scientist TimBerners-Lee. He put up the first

Web site in 1991, in an effort to foster a computer network that would enable

scientists to easily share their research. Other scientists and academics had created

a number of browsers to surf this early Web, but the first mainstream browser-and

the whole culture of Web browsing for the general public-was created by a tiny start-up

company in Mountain View, California, called Netscape. Netscape went public on August

9, 1995, and the world has not been the same since.

As John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist whose firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield

& Byers had backed Netscape, put it, "The Netscape IPO was a clarion call to the world

to wake up to the Internet. Until then, it had been the province of the early adopters

and geeks."

This Netscape-triggered phase drove the flattening process in several key ways: It

gave us the first broadly popular commercial browser to surf the Internet. The

Netscape browser not only brought the Internet alive but also made the Internet

accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to eighty-five-year-olds. The more alive

the Internet became, the more consumers wanted to do different things on the Web,

so the more they de57

manded computers, software, and telecommunications networks that could easily

digitize words, music, data, and photos and transport them on the Internet to anyone

else's computer. This demand was satisfied by another catalytic event: the rollout

of Windows 95, which shipped the week after Netscape took its stock public. Windows

95 would soon become the operating system used by most people worldwide, and unlike

previous versions of Windows, it was equipped with built-in Internet support, so that

not just browsers but all PC applications could "know about the Internet" and interact

with it.

Looking back, what enabled Netscape to take off was the existence, from the earlier

phase, of millions of PCs, many already equipped with modems. Those are the shoulders

Netscape stood on. What Netscape did was bring a new killer app-the browser-to this

installed base ofPCs, making the computer andits connectivity inherently more useful

for millions of people. This in turn set off an explosion in demand for all things

digital and sparked the Internet boom, because every investor looked at the Internet

and concluded that if everything was going to be digitized-data, inventories,

commerce, books, music, photos, and entertainment-and transported and sold on the

Internet, then the demand for Internet-based products and services would be infinite.

This led to the dot-com stock bubble and a massive overinvestment in the fiber-optic

cable needed to carry all the new digital information. This development, in turn,

wired the whole world together, and, without anyone really planning it, made Bangalore

a suburb of Boston.

Let's look at each one of these developments.

When I sat down with Jim Barksdale, the former Netscape CEO, to interview him for

this book, I explained to him that one of the early chapters was about the ten

innovations, events, and trends that had flattened the world. The first event, I told

him, was 11/9, and I explained the significance of that date. Then I said, "Let me

see if you can guess the significance of the second date, 8/9." That was all I told

him: 8/9. It took Barksdale only a second to ponder that before shooting back with

the right answer: "The day Netscape went public!"

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Few would argue that Barksdale is one of the great American entrepreneurs. He helped

Federal Express develop its package tracking and tracing system, then moved over to

McCaw Cellular, the mobile phone company, built that up, and oversaw its merger with

AT&T in 1994. Just before the sale closed, he was approached by a headhunter to become

the CEO of a new company called Mosaic Communications, forged by two now-legendary

innovators-Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen. In mid-1994, Clark, the founder of Silicon

Graphics, had joined forces with Andreessen to found Mosaic, which would quickly be

renamed Netscape Communications. Andreessen, a brilliant young computer scientist,

had just spearheaded a small software project at the National Center for

Supercomputing Applications (NC SA), based at the University of Illinois, that

developed the first really effective Web browser, also called Mosaic. Clark and

Andreessen quickly understood the huge potential for Web-browsing software and

decided to partner up to commercialize it. As Netscape began to grow, they reached

out to Barksdale for guidance and insight into how best to go public.

Today we take this browser technology for granted, but it was actually one of the

most important inventions in modern history. When Andreessen was back at the

University of Illinois NCSA lab, he found that he had PCs, workstations, and the basic

network connectivity to move files around the Internet, but it was still not very

exciting-because there was nothing to browse with, no user interface to pull up and

display the contents of other people's Web sites. So Andreessen and his team developed

the Mosaic browser, making Web sites viewable for any idiot, scientist, student, or

grandma. Marc Andreessen did not invent the Internet, but he did as much as any single