I know that America will catch up sooner or later with the rest of the world in wireless technology. It's already happening. But this section about the tenth flattener is not just about wireless. It is about what I call “the steroids.” I call certain new technologies the steroids because they are amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners. They are taking all the forms of collaboration highlighted in this section– outsourcing, offshoring, open-sourcing, supply-chaining, insourcing, and in-forming-and making it possible to do each and every one of them in a way that is “digital, mobile, virtual, and personal,” as former HP CEO Carly Fiorina put it in her speeches, thereby enhancing each one and making the world flatter by the day.
By “digital,” Fiorina means that thanks to the PC-Windows-Netscape-work flow revolutions, all analog content and processes– everything from photography to entertainment to communication to word processing to architectural design to the management of my home lawn sprinkler system-are being digitized and therefore can be shaped, manipulated, and transmitted over computers, the Internet, satellites, or fiber-optic cable. By “virtual,” she means that the process of shaping, manipulating, and transmitting this digitized content can be done at very high speeds, with total ease, so that you never have to think about it-thanks to all the underlying digital pipes, protocols, and standards that have now been installed. By “mobile,” she means that thanks to wireless technology, all this can be done from anywhere, with anyone, through any device, and can be taken anywhere. And by “personal,” she means that it can be done by you, just for you, on your own device.
What does the flat world look like when you take all these new forms of collaboration and turbocharge them in this way? Let me give just one example. Bill Brody, the president of Johns Hopkins, told me this story in the summer of 2004: “I am sitting in a medical meeting in Vail and the [doctor] giving a lecture quotes a study from Johns Hopkins University. And the guy speaking is touting a new approach to treating prostate cancer that went against the grain of the current surgical method. It was a minimally invasive approach to prostate cancer. So he quotes a study by Dr. Patrick Walsh, who had developed the state-of-the-art standard of care for prostate surgery. This guy who is speaking proposes an alternate method-which was controversial-but he quotes from Walsh's Hopkins study in a way that supported his approach. When he said that, I said to myself, That doesn't sound like Dr. Walsh's study.' So I had a PDA [personal digital assistant], and I immediately went online [wirelessly] and got into the Johns Hopkins portal and into Medline and did a search right while I was sitting there. Up come all the Walsh abstracts. I toggled on one and read it, and it was not at all what the guy was saying it was. So I raised my hand during the Q and A and read two lines from the abstract, and the guy just turned beet red.”
The digitization and storage of all the Johns Hopkins faculty research in recent years made it possible for Brody to search it instantly and virtually without giving it a second thought. The advances in wireless technology made it possible for him to do that search from anywhere with any device. And his handheld personal computer enabled him to do that search personally-by himself, just for himself.
What are the steroids that made all this possible?
One simple way to think about computing, at any scale, is that it is comprised of three things: computational capability, storage capability, and input/output capability-the speed by which information is drawn in and out of the computer/storage complexes. And all of these have been steadily increasing since the days of the first bulky mainframes. This mutually reinforcing progress constitutes a significant steroid. As a result of it, year after year we have been able to digitize, shape, crunch, and transmit more words, music, data, and entertainment than ever before.