Thomas Friedman - The World is Flat

A critical mass of IBM PCs, and the Windows operating system that brought them to life, came together in roughly this same time period that the wall fell, and their diffusion put the nail in the coffin of communism, because they vastly improved horizontal communication-to the detriment of the exclusively top-down form that communism was based upon. They also greatly enhanced personal information gathering and personal empowerment. (Each component of this information revolution was brought about by separate evolutions: The phone network evolved from the desire of people to talk to each other over long distances. The fax machine evolved as a way to transmit written communication over the phone network. The PC was diffused by the original killer apps-spreadsheets and word processing. And Windows evolved out of the need to make all of this usable, and programmable, by the masses.)

The first IBM PC hit the markets in 1981. At the same time, many computer scientists around the world had started using these things called the Internet and e-mail. The first version of the Windows operating system shipped in 1985, and the real breakthrough version that made PCs truly user-friendly-Windows 3.0-shipped on May 22, 1990, only six months after the wall went down. In this same time period, some people other than scientists started to discover that if they bought a PC and a dial-up modem, they could connect their PCs to their telephones and send e-mails through private Internet service providers-like CompuServe and America Online.

“The diffusion of personal computers, fax machines, Windows, and dial-up modems connected to a global telephone network all came together in the late 1980s and early 1990s to create the basic platform that started the global information revolution,” argued Craig J. Mundie, the chief technology officer for Microsoft. The key was the melding of them all together into a single interoperable system. That happened, said Mundie, once we had in crude form a standardized computing platform-the IBM PC-along with a standardized graphical user interface for word processing and spreadsheets-Windows-along with a standardized tool for communication-dial-up modems and the global phone network. Once we had that basic interoperable platform, then the killer applications drove its diffusion far and wide.

“People found that they really liked doing all these things on a computer, and they really improved productivity,” said Mundie. “They all had broad individual appeal and made individual people get up and buy a Windows-enabled PC and put it on their desk, and that forced the diffusion of this new platform into the world of corporate computing even more. People said, 'Wow, there is an asset here, and we should take advantage of it.'”

The more established Windows became as the primary operating system, added Mundie, “the more programmers went out and wrote applications for rich-world businesses to put on their computers, so they could do lots of new and different business tasks, which started to enhance productivity even more. Tens of millions of people around the world became programmers to make the PC do whatever they wanted in their own languages. Windows was eventually translated into thirty-eight languages. People were able to become familiar with the PC in their own languages.”

This was all new and exciting, but we shouldn't forget how constricted this early PC-Windows-modem platform was. “This platform was constrained by too many architectural limits,” said Mundie. “There was missing infrastructure.” The Internet as we know it today-with seemingly magical transmission protocols that can connect everyone and everything-had not yet emerged. Back then, networks had only very basic protocols for exchanging files and e-mail messages. So people who were using computers with the same type of operating systems and software could exchange documents through e-mail or file transfers, but even doing this was tricky enough that only the computing elite took the trouble. You couldn't just sit down and zap an e-mail or a file to anyone anywhere-especially outside your own company or outside your own Internet service-the way you can today. Yes, AOL users could communicate with CompuServe users, but it was neither simple nor reliable. As a result, said Mundie, a huge amount of data and creativity was accumulating in all those computers, but there was no easy, interoperable way to share it and mold it. People could write new applications that allowed selected systems to work together, but in general this was limited to planned exchanges between PCs within the network of a single company.

This period from 11/9 to the mid-1990s still led to a huge advance in personal empowerment, even if networks were limited. It was the age of “Me and my machine can now talk to each other better and faster, so that I personally can do more tasks” and the age of “Me and my machine can now talk to a few friends and some other people in my company better and faster, so we can become more productive.” The walls had fallen and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been-but the age of seamless global communication had not dawned.

Though we didn't notice it, there was a discordant note in this exciting new era. It wasn't only Americans and Europeans who joined the people of the Soviet Empire in celebrating the fall of the wall-and claming credit for it. Someone else was raising a glass-not of champagne but of thick Turkish coffee. His name was Osama bin Laden and he had a different narrative. His view was that it was the jihadi fighters in Afghanistan, of which he was one, who had brought down the Soviet Empire by forcing the Red Army to withdraw from Afghanistan (with some help from U.S. and Pakistani forces). And once that mission had been accomplished— the Soviets completed their pullout from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, just nine months before the fall of the Berlin Wall-bin Laden looked around and found that the other superpower, the United States, had a huge presence in his own native land, Saudi Arabia, the home of the two holiest cities in Islam. And he did not like it.

So, while we were dancing on the wall and opening up our Windows and proclaiming that there was no ideological alternative left to free-market capitalism, bin Laden was turning his gun sights on America. Both bin Laden and Ronald Reagan saw the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” but bin Laden came to see America as evil too. He did have an ideological alternative to free-market capitalism-political Islam. He did not feel defeated by the end of the Soviet Union; he felt emboldened by it. He did not feel attracted to the widened playing field; he felt repelled by it. And he was not alone. Some thought that Ronald Reagan brought down the wall by bankrupting the Soviet Union through an arms race; others thought IBM, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates brought down the wall by empowering individuals to download the future. But a world away, in Muslim lands, many thought bin Laden and his comrades brought down the Soviet Empire and the wall with religious zeal, and millions of them were inspired to upload the past.

In short, while we were celebrating 11/9, the seeds of another memorable date—9/11—were being sown. But more about that later in the book. For now, let the flattening continue.

By the mid-1990s, the PC-Windows network revolution had reached its limits. If the world was going to become really interconnected, and really start to flatten out, the revolution needed to go to the next phase. And the next phase, notes Microsoft's Mundie, “was to go from a PC-based computing platform to an Internet-based platform.” The killer applications that drove this new phase were e-mail and Internet browsing. E-mail was being driven by the rapidly expanding consumer portals like AOL, CompuServe, and eventually MSN. But it was the new killer app, the Web browser-which could retrieve documents or Web pages stored on Internet Web sites and display them on any computer screen-that really captured the imagination. The actual concept of the World Wide Web-a system for creating, organizing, and linking documents so they could be easily browsed-was created by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee. He put up the first Web site in 1991, in an effort to foster a computer network that would enable scientists to easily share their research. Other scientists and academics had created a number of browsers to surf this early Web, but the first mainstream browser-and the whole culture of Web browsing for the general public-was created by a tiny start-up company in Mountain View, California, called Netscape. Netscape went public on August 9, 1995, and the world has not been the same since.