Old times sake - Communication and Information access

In the early 90s, communication and internet connectivity were dampeners too. My father waited for several years, to hear his first dial tone on a phone that he owned. Not long ago, say in the early 90's, I reminisce the times our family huddled around a telephone, we waited for a trunk call to speak to family members barely 1000 miles away. Even worse, before the arrival of the phone, the wait was as long as an hour from a public telephone booth. Kudos to the tehcie geniuses and teh DOT COM burst, today, it takes roughly an hour for me to get a permanent communication line, few minutes to get a mobile phone, and barely few seconds to get connected to my friends in Toronto or parents in Mumbai. As long as I have the money to pay, I could make my dial tone follow me wherever I am on the planet.

There were a few things that struck me as important as education. I remember my time as a School kiddo, when I spent several days showing my parents and sister how to access information on the internet. Now they can find more information than they’d ever need and can easily communicate with me in a few seconds on the Web. This “level playing field” for everyone was a distant dream twenty years ago. Pictures of needing a channel to watch Hollywood movies, tri-band transistors, video player that my father brought from overseas in 1987 are still fresh.

I was a vivid admirer of the world encyclopedia book and subscribing to such books in those days wasn’t easy. I had to pay hefty amounts to get to the local library to lay my hands on such books. It was certainly not a level playing field then.

Flatness is not about outsourcing and off shoring to India, China or any place under the sun; it is about access, crumbling of boundaries, ensuring that anyone in the world can build products and services from any part of the world and sell it in any part of the world where he/she can get maximum value. (a common definition that you will come across in the web)

My next chapter will include the conclusion to this Flat world concept, however the underlying fact about the Flat World as whole in the blog with different contents would remain the same - The World is Flat.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to any characted, fiction, or blogs is purely co-incidential.

Images: Connector --> courtesy: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/ and Books --> courtesy: http://psychservices.ucsd.edu/