Then add another hardware steroid to the mix: file sharing. It started with Napster paving the way for two of us to share songs stored on each other’s computers. “At its peak,” according to Howstuffworks.com, “Napster was perhaps the most popular Website ever created. In less than a year, it went from zero to 60 million visitors per month. Then it was shut down by a court order because of copyright violations, and wouldn’t re-launch until 2003 as a legal music-download site. The original Napster became so popular so quickly because it offered a unique product—free music that you could obtain nearly effortlessly from a gigantic database.” That database was actually a file-sharing architecture by which Napster facilitated a connection between my computer and yours so that we could swap music files. The original Napster is dead, but file-sharing technology is still around and is getting more sophisticated every day, greatly enhancing collaboration.
Finally, add one last hardware steroid that brings these technology breakthroughs together for consumers: the steady breakthrough in multipurpose devices—ever smaller and more powerful laptops, cell phones, p. 165 and handheld personal organizers that can keep your appointments, make calls, send e-mail, take pictures, and even serve as video cameras.
Collaborating with all this digitized data is going to be made even easier and cheaper thanks to another burgeoning steroid—voice over Internet protocol service, known as VoIP. VoIP allows you to make phone calls over the Internet by turning voices into data packets that are sent down Internet networks and converted back into voices on the other end. VoIP allows anyone who subscribes to the service through his phone company or private operator to receive unlimited local and long-distance phone calls, via the Internet, over his personal computer, laptop, or PDA—with just a small microphone attachment. It is personal and it will be delivered virtually—the underlying pipes will make it happen without your having to think about it at all. It will make every business and personal phone call to anywhere in the world as cheap as a local call—i.e., almost free. If that won’t amplify every form of collaboration, I don’t know what will.
Consider this item from the November 1, 2004, BusinessWeek, about the pioneering VoIP company Skype: “Eriksen Translations Inc. is a small business with a big footprint. The Brooklyn (N.Y.) company relies on 5,000 freelancers scattered around the world to help translate business documents in 75 languages for U.S. clients. That means phone bills of about $1,000 a month. So when business development manager Claudia Waitman heard about a new company called Skype Technologies that offers free voice calls over the Internet to other Skype users anywhere in the world, she jumped. Six months after signing up, Eriksen’s phone costs already have fallen 10 percent. Even better, its employees and freelancers confer more often, allowing them to work faster and more efficiently. ‘It has changed the whole way we work,’ Waitman says.”
VoIP is going to revolutionize the telecommunications industry, which, since its inception, has been based on the simple notion that companies charge you for how long you talk and over what distance. As consumers get more VoIP choices, the competition will be such that telecom companies won’t be able to charge for time and distance much longer. Voice will become free. What phone companies will compete over, and charge for, will be the add-ons. The old voice platform did not lend itself p. 166 well to innovation. But when you put voice on an Internet platform, all sorts of innovative options for collaboration become possible. You will have a buddy list of people and all you will have to do is double-click on a name and the call will go through. You want caller ID? The caller’s picture will come up on your screen. Companies will compete over SoIP (services over the Internet protocol): who can offer you the best videoconferencing while you are talking over your computer, PDA or laptop; who can enable you to talk to someone while easily inviting a third or fourth person into the conversation; who can enable you to talk and swap document files and send text messages at the same time, so you can actually speak and work on a document together while talking. You will be able to leave someone a voice message that can be converted to text, along with a document attachment that the two of you may be working on. Said Mike Volpi, Cisco’s senior vice president for routing technology, “It won’t be about distance and how long you talk, but how you create value around voice communication. The voice will be free; it’s what you enable customers to do around it that will differentiate companies.”
People who live in Bangalore or Beijing will be able to get themselves listed in the Yellow Pages in New York. Looking for an accountant? Just double-click Hang Zhou in Beijing or Vladimir Tolstoy in Moscow or Ernst & Young in New York. Take your choice for accounting: Tiananmen Square, Red Square, or Union Square. They’ll be happy to collaborate with you in filling out your tax returns.
There is another steroid, related to VoIP, which will turbocharge this turbocharger: the breakthrough improvements in videoconferencing. HP and the film company DreamWorks SKG collaborated on the design of a videoconferencing suite—with DreamWorks bringing its movie and sound expertise and HP contributing its computing and compression technology—that is breathtaking. Each party to the videoconference sits at a long table facing a wall of flat-panel TV screens and cameras pointed at them. The flat-panel screens display the people at the other site, which could be anywhere in the world. It creates an effect of everyone sitting around a single conference table and is apparently a qualitatively different experience from anything that has been on the market before. I had a chance to participate in a demonstration of it, and it was so realistic that p. 167 you could practically feel the breath of the other parties to the videoconference, when in fact half of us were in Santa Barbara and half were five hundred miles away. Because DreamWorks is doing film and animation work all over the world, it felt that it had to have a videoconferencing solution where its creative people could really communicate all their thoughts, facial expressions, feelings, ire, enthusiasm, and raised eyebrows. HP’s chief strategy and technology officer, Shane Robison, told me that HP plans to have these videoconferencing suites for sale by 2005 at a cost of roughly $250,000 each. That is nothing compared to the airline tickets and wear and tear on executives having to travel regularly to London or Tokyo for face-to-face meetings. Companies could easily make one of these suites pay for itself in a year. This level of videoconferencing, once it proliferates, will make remote development, outsourcing, and off-shoring that much easier and more efficient.
And now the icing on the cake, the übersteroid that makes it all mobile: wireless. Wireless is what will allow you take everything that has been digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere.
“The natural state of communications is wireless,” argued Alan Cohen, the senior vice president at Airespace. It started with voice, because people wanted to be able to make a phone call anytime, from anyplace, to anywhere. That is why for many people the cell phone is the most important phone they own. By the early twenty-first century, people began to develop that same expectation and with it the desire for data communication—the ability to access the Internet, e-mail, or any business files anytime, anywhere, using a cell phone, PalmPilot, or some other personal device. (And now a third element is entering the picture, creating more demand for wireless technology and enhancing the flattening of the earth: machines talking to machines wirelessly, such as Wal-Mart’s RFID chips, little wireless devices that automatically transmit information to suppliers’ computers, allowing them to track inventory.)
In the early days of computing (Globalization 2.0), you worked in the office. There was a big mainframe computer, and you literally had to walk over and get the people running the mainframe to extract or input p. 168 information for you. It was like an oracle. Then, thanks to the PC and the Internet, e-mail, the laptop, the browser, and the client server, I could access from my own screen all sorts of data and information being stored on the network. In this era you were delinked from the office and could work at home, at the beach house, or in a hotel. Now we are in Globalizati
on 3.0, where, thanks to digitization, miniaturization, virtualization, personalization, and wireless, I can be processing, collecting, or transmitting voice or data from anywhere to anywhere—as an individual or as a machine.
“Your desk goes with you everywhere you are now,” said Cohen. And the more people have the ability to push and pull information from anywhere to anywhere faster, the more barriers to competition and communication disappear. All of a sudden, my business has phenomenal distribution. I don’t care whether you are in Bangalore or Bangor, I can get to you and you can get to me. More and more, people now want and expect wireless mobility to be there, just like electricity. We are rapidly moving into the age of the “mobile me,” said Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Motorola. If consumers are paying for any form of content, whether it is information, entertainment, data, games, or stock quotes, they increasingly want to be able to access it anytime, anywhere.
Right now consumers are caught in a maze of wireless technology offerings and standards that are still not totally interoperable. As we all know, some wireless technology works in one neighborhood, state, or country and not in another.
The “mobile me” revolution will be complete when you can move seamlessly around the town, the country, or the world with whatever device you want. The technology is getting there. When this is fully diffused, the “mobile me” will have its full flattening effect, by freeing people to truly be able to work and communicate from anywhere to anywhere with anything.
I got a taste of what is coming by spending a morning at the Tokyo headquarters of NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese cellular giant that is at the cutting edge of this process and far ahead of America in offering total interoperability inside Japan. DoCoMo is an abbreviation for Do p. 169 Communications Over the Mobile Network; it also means “anywhere” in Japanese. My day at DoCoMo’s headquarters started with a tour conducted by a robot, which bowed in perfect Japanese fashion and then gave me a spin around DoCoMo’s showroom, which now features handheld video cell phones so you can see the person you are speaking with.
“Young people are using our mobile phones today as two-way videophones,” explained Tamon Mitsuishi, senior VP of the Ubiquitous Business Department at DoCoMo. “Everyone takes out their phones, they start dialing each other and have visual conversations. Of course there are some people who prefer not to see each other’s faces.” Thanks to DoCoMo technology, if you don’t want to show your face you can substitute a cartoon character for yourself and manipulate the keyboard so that it not only will speak for you but also will get angry for you and get happy for you. “So this is a mobile phone, and video camera, but it has also evolved to the extent that it has functions similar to a PC,” he added. “You need to move your buttons quickly [with your thumb]. We call ourselves ‘the thumb people.’ Young girls in high school can now move their thumbs faster than they can type on a PC.”
By the way, I asked, what does the “Ubiquitous Department” do?
“Now that we have seen the spread of the Internet around the world,” answered Mitsuishi, “what we believe we have to offer is the next step. Internet communication until today has been mostly between individuals—e-mail and other information. But what we are already starting to see is communication between individuals and machines and between machines. We are moving into that kind of phenomenon, because people want to lead a richer lifestyle, and businesses want more efficient practices . . . So young people in their business life use PCs in the offices, but in their private time they base their lifestyles on a mobile phone. There is now a growing movement to allow payment by mobile phone. [With] a smart card you will be able to make payments in virtual shops and smart shops. So next to the cash register there will be a reader of the card, and you just scan your phone and it becomes your credit card too . . .
“We believe that the mobile phone will become the essential conp. 170troller of a person’s life,” added Mitsuishi, oblivious of the double meaning of the English word “control.” “For example, in the medical field it will be your authentication system and you can examine your medical records, and to make payments you will have to hold a mobile phone. You will not be able to lead a life without a mobile phone, and it will control things at home too. We believe that we need to expand the range of machines that can be controlled by mobile phone.”
There is plenty to worry about in this future, from kids being lured by online sexual predators through their cell phones, to employees spending too much time playing mindless phone games, to people using their phone cameras for all sorts of illicit activities. Some Japanese were going into bookstores, pulling down cookbooks, and taking pictures of the recipes and then walking out. Fortunately, camera phones are now being enabled to make a noise when they shoot a picture, so that a store owner, or the person standing next to you in the locker room, will know if he is on Candid Camera. Because your Internet-enabled camera phone is not just a camera; it is also a copy machine, with worldwide distribution potential.
DoCoMo is now working with other Japanese companies on an arrangement by which you may be walking down the street and see a poster of a concert by Madonna in Tokyo. The poster will have a bar code and you can buy your tickets by just scanning the bar code. Another poster might be for a new Madonna CD. Just scan the bar code with your cell phone and it will give you a sample of the songs. If you like them, scan it again and you can buy the whole album and have it home-delivered. No wonder my New York Times colleague in Japan, Todd Zaun, who is married to a Japanese woman, remarked to me that there is so much information the Japanese can now access from their Internet-enabled wireless phones that “when I am with my Japanese relatives and someone has a question, the first thing they do is reach for the phone.”
I’m exhausted just writing about all this. But it is hard to exaggerate how much this tenth flattener—the steroids—is going to amplify and further empower all the other forms of collaboration. These steroids should p. 171 make open-source innovation that much more open, because they will enable more individuals to collaborate with one another in more ways and from more places than ever before. They will enhance outsourcing, because they will make it so much easier for a single department of any company to collaborate with another company. They will enhance supply-chaining, because headquarters will be able to be connected in real time with every individual employee stocking the shelves, every individual package, and every Chinese factory manufacturing the stuff inside them. They will enhance insourcing—having a company like UPS come deep inside a retailer and manage its whole supply chain, using drivers who can interact with its warehouses, and with every customer, carrying his own PDA. And most obviously, they will enhance in-forming—the ability to manage your own knowledge supply chain.
Sir John Rose, the chief executive of Rolls-Royce, gave me a wonderful example of how wireless and other steroids are enhancing Rolls-Royce’s ability to do work flow and other new forms of collaboration with its customers. Let’s say you are British Airways and you are flying a Boeing 777 across the Atlantic. Somewhere over Greenland, one of your Rolls-Royce engines gets hit with lightning. The passengers and pilots might be worried, but there is no need. Rolls-Royce is on the case. That Rolls-Royce engine is connected by transponder to a satellite and is beaming data about its condition and performance, at all times, down into a computer in Rolls-Royce’s operations room. That is true of many Rolls-Royce airplane engines in operation. Thanks to the artificial intelligence in the Rolls-Royce computer, based on complex algorithms, it can track anomalies in its engines while in operation. The artificial intelligence in the Rolls-Royce computer knows that this engine was probably hit by lightning, and feeds out a report to a Rolls-Royce engineer.
“With the real-time data we receive via satellites, we can identify an ‘event’ and our engineers can make remote diagnoses,” said Rose. “Under normal circumstances, after an engine gets hit by lightning you would have to land the plane, call in an engineer, do a visual inspection, and make a dec
ision about how much damage might have been done and whether the plane has to be delayed in order to do a repair.
“But remember, these airlines do not have much turnaround time. If p. 172 this plane is delayed, you throw off the crews, you drop out of your position to fly back home. It gets very costly. We can monitor and analyze engine performance automatically in real time, with our engineers making decisions about exactly what is needed by the time the plane has landed. And if we can determine by all the information we have about the engine that no intervention or even inspection is needed, the airplane can return on schedule, and that saves our customers time and money.”
Engines talking to computers, talking to people, talking back to the engines, followed by people talking to people—all done from anywhere to anywhere. That is what happens when all the flatteners start to get turbocharged by all the steroids.
Can you hear me now?
Three: The Triple Convergence
p. 173 What is the triple convergence? In order to explain what I mean, let me tell a personal story and share one of my favorite television commercials.
The story took place in March 2004. I had made plans to fly from Baltimore to Hartford on Southwest Airlines to visit my daughter Orly, who goes to school in New Haven, Connecticut. Being a tech-savvy guy, I didn’t bother with a paper ticket but ordered an e-ticket through American Express. As anyone who flies regularly on Southwest knows, the cheapo airline has no reserved seats. When you check in, your ticket says simply A, B, or C, with the As boarding first, the Bs boarding second, and the Cs boarding last. As veterans of Southwest also know, you do not want to be a C. If you are, you will almost certainly end up in a middle seat with no space to put your carry-ons in the overhead bin. If you want to sit in a window or aisle seat and be able to store your stuff, you want to be an A. Since I was carrying some bags of clothing for my daughter, I definitely wanted to be an A. So I got up early to make sure I got to the Baltimore airport ninety-five minutes before my scheduled departure. I walked up to the Southwest Airlines e-ticket machine, stuck in my credit card, and used the touch screen to get my ticket—a thoroughly modern man, right? Well, out came the ticket and it said B.
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