...Open-Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities Alan Cohen still remembers the first time he heard the word "Apache" as an adult, and it wasn't while watching a cowboys-and-Indians movie. It was the 1990s, the dot-com market was booming, and he was a senior manager for IBM, helping to oversee its emerging e-commerce business. "I had a whole team with me and a budget of about $8 million," Cohen recalled. "We were competing head-to-head with Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, Sun-all the big boys. And we were 82 playing this very big-stakes game for e-commerce. IBM had a huge sales force selling all this e-commerce software. One day I asked the development director who worked for me, 'Say, Jeff, walk me through the development process for these e-commerce systems. What is the underlying Web server?' And he says to me, It's built on top of Apache.' The first thing I think of is John Wayne. 'What is Apache?' I ask. And he says it is a shareware program for Web server technology. He said it was produced for free by a bunch of geeks just working online in some kind of open-source chat room. I was floored. I said, 'How do you buy it?' And he says, Tou download it off a Web site for free.' And I said, 'Well, who supports it if something goes wrong?' And he says, 'I don't know-it just works!' And that was my first exposure to Apache . . . "Now you have to remember, back then Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Netscape were all trying to build commercial Web servers. These were...
Words: 12980 - Pages: 52
...The World is Flat Thomas L Friedman Kq p K To Matt and Kay and to Ron Kq p K Contents How the World Became Flat One: While I Was Sleeping / 3 Two: The Ten Forces That Flattened the World / 48 Flattener#l. 11/9/89 Flattener #2. 8/9/95 Flattener #3. Work Flow Software Flattener #4. Open-Sourcing Flattener #5. Outsourcing Flattener #6. Offshoring Flattener #7. Supply-Chaining Flattener #8. Insourcing Flattener #9. In-forming Flattener #10. The Steroids Three: The Triple Convergence / 173 Four: The Great Sorting Out / 201 America and the Flat World Five: America and Free Trade / 225 Six: The Untouchables / 237 Seven: The Quiet Crisis / 250 Eight: This Is Not a Test / 276 Developing Countries and the Flat World Nine: The Virgin of Guadalupe / 309 Companies and the Flat World Geopolitics and the Flat World Eleven: The Unflat World / 371 Twelve: The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention / 414 Conclusion: Imagination Thirteen: 11/9 Versus 9/11 / 441 Acknowledgments I 471 Index I 475 Kq p K :::::How the World Became Flat ::::: ONE While I Was Sleeping Your Highnesses, as Catholic Christians, and princes who love and promote the holy Christian faith, and are enemies of the doctrine of Mahomet, and of all idolatry and heresy, determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the above-mentioned countries of India, to see the said princes, people, and territories, and to learn their disposition and the proper method of converting them to our...
Words: 170179 - Pages: 681
...relationship-free world in which every economic transaction is contested globally. In his “flat” world, your wages are set in Shanghai. In fact, most of the footloose relationship-free jobs in apparel and footwear and consumer electronics departed the United States several decades ago, and few U.S. workers today feel the force of Chinese and Indian competition, notwithstanding the alarming anecdotes about the outsourcing of intellectual services. Of course, standardization, mechanization, and computerization all work to increase the number of footloose tasks, but innovation and education work in the opposite direction, creating relationship-based activities—like the writing of this review. It may only be personal conceit, but I imagine there is a reason why the Journal of Economic Literature asked me to do this review. 1. Prologue hen the Journal of Economic Literature asked me to write a review of The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2005) by Thomas Friedman, I responded with enthusiasm, knowing it wouldn’t take much effort on my part. As ∗ Leamer: Anderson Graduate School of Management, Department of Economics and Department of Statistics, UCLA. Thanks for comments from my brother, Laurence Leamer, my UCLA colleagues at the Political Economy lunch (Dan Treisman and Michael Ross), Eric Rasumusen, John Talbot and my former students, Christopher Thornberg, Peter Schott and...
Words: 25516 - Pages: 103
