Hello

According to T. Friedman (The World Is Flat), the ten forces which have changed the world into the "global village" (flattened it):

- 9 November 1989: fall of the Berlin Wall and opening the borders of the Eastern Europe countries,
- 9 August 1995: the new age of connectivity (the day Netscape went public),
- work flow software (especially XML and SOAP software),
- open source projects, some of which can very successful compete with commercial solutions,
- problem of the year 2000 and increase of the IT outsourcing to India as Europe and America did not have sufficient resources to challenge it,
- offshoring to China due to entering China to WTO in 2001,
- global supply-chaining (example: Wal-Mart),
- BPO transformation (UPS, FedEx as companies which do more than only transportation of letters and parcels),
- search-engines which made it possible to get information in a cheap and quick way,
- WLAN technology which makes it possible to surf in the Internet world-wide, looking for information and sending e-mails. It is expected that using this technology will help to reduce the gap between the poorer and the reacher regions of the world.

What other factors would you say make it possible to transform the world into the "global village"? I am looking forward to your answers!

Best regards

Magdalena Szarafin
http://www.szarafin.info

Magdalena Szarafin
http://www.szarafin.info