I was fuming. “How in the world could I be a B?” I said to myself, looking at my watch. “There is no way that many people got here before me. This thing is rigged! This is fixed! This is nothing more than a slot machine!”
I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so I could hunt for space in the overhead bins. Forty minutes later, the flight was called. From the B line, I enviously watched all the As file on board ahead of me, with a certain barely detectable air of superiority. And then I saw it.
Many of the people in the A line didn't have normal e-tickets like mine. They were just carrying what looked to me like crumpled pieces of white printer paper, but they weren't blank. They had boarding passes and bar codes printed on them, as if the As had downloaded their boarding passes off the Internet at home and printed them out on their home printers. Which, I quickly learned, was exactly what they had done. I didn't know it, but Southwest had recently announced that beginning at 12:01 a.m. the night before a flight, you could download your ticket at home, print it out, and then just have the bar code scanned by the gate agent before you boarded.
“Friedman,” I said to myself, looking at this scene, “you are so twentieth-century... You are so Globalization 2.0.” In Globalization 1.0 there was a ticket agent. In Globalization 2.0 the e-ticket machine replaced the ticket agent. In Globalization 3.0 you are your own ticket agent.
The television commercial is from Konica Minolta Business Technologies for a new multipurpose device it sells called bizhub, a piece of office machinery that allows you to do black-and-white or color printing, copy a document, fax it, scan it, scan it to e-mail, or Internet-fax it—all from the same machine. The commercial begins with a rapid cutting back and forth between two guys, one in his office and the other standing at the bizhub machine. They are close enough to talk by raising their voices. Dom is senior in authority but slow on the uptake-the kind of guy who hasn't kept up with changing technology (my kind of guy!). He can see Ted standing at the bizhub machine when he leans back in his chair and peers out his office doorway.
Dom: (At his desk) Hey, I need that chart. Ted: (At the bizhub) I'm e-mailing it now.
Dom: You're e-mailing from the copy machine?
Ted: No, I'm e-mailing from bizhub.
Dom: Bizhub? Wait, did you make my copies yet?
Ted: Right after I scan this.
Dom: You're scanning at an e-mail machine?
Ted: E-mail machine? I'm at the bizhub machine.
Dom: (Bewildered) Copying?
Ted: (Trying to be patient) E-mailing, then scanning, then copying.
Dom: (Long pause) Bizhub?
VO: (Over an animated graphic of bizhub illustrating its multiple functions) Amazing versatility and affordable color. That's bizhub, from Konica Minolta.
(Cut to Dom alone at the bizhub machine, trying to see if it will also dispense coffee into his mug.)
Southwest was able to offer its at-home ticketing, and Konica Minolta could offer bizhub, because of what I call the triple convergence. What are the components of this triple convergence? The short answer is this: First, right around the year 2000, all ten of the flatteners discussed in the previous chapter started to converge and work together in ways that created a new, flatter, global playing field. As this new playing field became established, both businesses and individuals began to adopt new habits, skills, and processes to get the most out of it. They moved from largely vertical means of creating value to more horizontal ones. The merger of this new playing field for doing business with the new ways of doing business was the second convergence, and it actually helped to flatten the world even further. Finally, just when all of this flattening was happening, a whole new group of people, several billion, in fact, walked out onto the playing field from China, India, and the former Soviet Empire. Thanks to the new flat world, and its new tools, some of them were quickly able to collaborate and compete directly with everyone else. This was the third convergence. Now let's look at each in detail.
Convergence I