$27.50
Customize It
Hardcover
496 pages
ISBN 9780374292881 Published April 2005
Farrar Straus Giroux
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Posted April 28, 2005 10:51 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Finance and Economics - 800 CEO Read Blog
This would be the yang to today's ying on The World Is Flat.
BusinessWeek Reviews Friedman
Posted April 28, 2005 5:29 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Global Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
Jack liked The World Is Flat.
BusinessWeek reviewed it and gave it 4 out of 5 stars.
More from Friedman
Posted April 15, 2005 5:59 a.m. by jack
In History and Biographies - 800 CEO Read Blog
I also liked this quote from The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman:
"In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping put China on the road to capitalism, declaring later that to get rich is glorious. When China first opened its tightly closed economy, companies in industrialized countries saw it as an incredible new market for exports. Every Western or Asian manufacturer dreamed of selling its equivalent of 1 billion pairs of underwear to a single market. Some foreign companies set up shop in China to do just that. But because China was not subject to world trade rules, it was able to restrict penetration into its market by those Western companies through various trade and investment barriers. And when it was not doing it deliberately, the sheer bureaucratic and cultural difficulties of doing business in China had the same effect. Many of the pioneer investors in China lost their shirts and pants and underwearand with Chinas Wide West legal system there was not much recourse.
Beginning in the 1980s, many investors, particularly overseas Chinese who knew how to operate in China, started to say, Well, if we cant sell that many things to the Chinese right now, why dont we use Chinas disciplined labor pool to make things there and sell them abroad? This dovetailed with the interests of Chinas leaders. China wanted to attract foreign manufactures and their technologiesnot simply to manufacture 1 billion pairs of underwear for sale in China but to use low-wage Chinese labor to also sell 6 billion pairs of underwear to everyone else in the world, and at prices that were a fraction of what the underwear companies in Europe or America or even Mexico were charging.
The World is Flat
Posted April 11, 2005 8:39 a.m. by jack
In Global Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
Tom Friedman, who has won three Pulitzer Prizes, has written what he calls "A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. It is not only about globalization but it is about how we got here. I am 100 pages into it and truly cant put it down. I have called Todd to read him paragraphs. Now I want to share a paragraph with all of you.
Talking about open sourcewhich I have always wondered about, being a non geekand how it is a challenge for Microsoft. He says:
"Why would so many people be ready to write software that would be given away for free? Partly it is out of the purely scientific challenge, which should never be underestimated. Partly it is because they all hate Microsoft for the way it has dominated the market and, in the view of many techies, bullied everyone else. Partly it is because they believe that open-source software can be kept more fresh and bugfree than any commercial software, because of the way it is constantly updated by an army of unpaid programmers. And partly it is because some big tech companies are paying engineers to work on Linux and other software, hoping it will cut into Microsofts market share and make it a weaker competitor all around. There are a lot of motives at work here, and not all of them altruistic. When you pet them all together, though, they make for a very powerful movement that will continue to present a major challenge to the whole commercial software model of buying a program and then downloading its fixes and buying its updates."
