Doug’s World

The World is Flat

As longtime readers know, I used to review the occasional book. Because I used to read a lot of books. A book or two a week, sometimes. Then I got a job at Microsoft. I’ve only read a few books in the last few months, mostly about C# or .NET.

But last week Megan got me a copy of “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. And somehow it made it to the top of my “to read” pile right away, and I’ve actually been reading it.

It’s a cool book. Several people I know have read it already, so I feel a bit late to the party. And after the way I’ve spent the last few weeks in my job at Microsoft, I can see why people would be recommending this book to me.

The opening paragraph starts with a description of a tee shot on the KGA golf course in Bangalore. Here’s a picture I took of that tee shot, during lunch break at an Office 2007 workshop three weeks ago. Friedman describes aiming at Microsoft, and my photo is a shot from Microsoft back to the golf course.

I was there in Bangalore for the Office 12 workshop (where I met Pali, Tarun, Raja, Amol and others), but I also met on Friday with Sonata. Datta and Sanjay are working on some content for OpenXmlDeveloper.org.

I also took a picture from the new Microsoft building, which is nearly ready to be occupied. Looking across the golf course from the open deck outside the cafeteria, you’re looking right down the middle of a runway of the nearby airport. Looks like it will be a cool place to hang out and watch planes taking off, hauling loads of software developers to and fro.

The premise of Friedman’s book has been discussed a lot on many forums (check out the Amazon comments), but here’s my synopsis. Friedman’s premise is that the business world has fundamentally changed in the last 5 years, while most people were distracted by things like the war on terror. Individuals can now collaborate effectively from anywhere around the globe, there is inexpensive high-speed internet connectivity to previously untapped markets (such as India and China), and there is a growing body of people who look at international business in a completely different way from how previous generations viewed such possibilities. That’s the thesis, and the book is full of anecdotal and statistical evidence that supports this thesis.

My own tangential experience of some of the people and places in this book is interesting, at least to me. For example, on page 206 he tells the story of how the state of Indiana outsourced its unemployment operations to Tata. Tata is a huge Indian tech consulting firm, a competitor of Sonata. When governor Joe Kernan discovered what a political brouhaha had been hatched by outsourcing the unemployement department to an Indian firm, he squelched the deal, but not before Tata had made roughly a million dollars on the deal.

So check out this picture, which has been on my web site since 1999. Mom and I were traveling in India, and we had bumped into a couple of ladies in Nepal the week before whose itinerary overlapped with ours for over a week through Kathmandu, Royal Chitwan National Park, and Varanasi. One of those ladies, Maggie Kernan (on the right in the foreground, black shirt with flowers on it) is the wife of Joe Kernan. She wasn’t the First Lady of Indiana when we met her — Joe was Lieutenant Governor then, but governor Frank O’Bannon (who had signed off on the Tata deal) had sudden health problems that catapulted Joe into the governor’s office.

Today I was on a conference call with Microsoft’s XML MVPs, to tell them about the site that I’ve been working on with Sonata. Shortly after the call, I got an email from Jeff Julian, an MVP on that call. I followed the link to one of Jeff’s blogs, EntrepreneursWithBlogs.com, and there I saw that Jeff had a very brief review of “The World is Flat” in which he recommends reading the first 100 pages and then skipping ahead to the last 3 chapters.

I’ve made it to page 207, but I’m going to take Jeff’s advice from here and skip to the last three chapters. I’m too busy to be reading this book. I mean, I just got off a conference call with Sonata!

Anybody else who’s read this book want to comment on it?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 11:34 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.