It's All About You…and Me
I just started reading Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat - partly because Steve Rubel had a post about it recently and partly because my father just finished reading it. While I have only read the first chapter, I was immediately struck by the book's fundamental thesis: today - more than any time in modern economic history - the individual is empowered (as opposed to nations and multi-national corporations).
This is a powerful message, which goes a long way in explaining many of the exciting things happening today. Take Web 2.0 as an example. What makes Web 2.0 different from the dot-com boom is it's possible for individuals to develop a world-class service using a modest amount capital. This makes it possible for people such as 37 Signals' Jason Fried to work from Chicago and quickly create cool applications with little or no venture capital. The power of the individual has lowered the entrepreneurial barriers to entry so you can create a world-class application/service such as Skype by tapping the brain-power of people around the world.
The power of the individual also explains why blogging has exploded (75,000 new blogs a day or one every second, according to Technorati). Blogs provide people with a digital way to communicate but they also let people build global brands and establish themselves as mini-corporations. This is why Nicholas Carr just “celebrated” his first anniversary in the blogosphere with a post that revealed blogging cost him $1425 (His explanation: “Welcome to the wacky world of citizen media where journalism is an avocation, like fox hunting used to be”). Other examples of economic empowerment are services such as eBay, which has taken garage sales and made them global, while allowing thousands of people to set up their own businesses. Ottawa-based Shopify is jumping into the “individual” market with e-commerce service for Web sites that can be set up in minutes.
All of these things are tremendously exciting, which may explain why Friedman felt so compelled to write a book shortly after starting a visit to India two years ago. I suspect it will take some time to finish reading The World is Flat given there are so many ideas to think about, but it's not often you run into the right book at the right time.
