By Thomas Friedman, Wired Magazine (print ed.), May 2005
Article that introduced Thomas Friedman's new book 'Why the World is Flat'. You do really need to read the book for the details, or the article for a more in-depth overview, but the 10 levellers are:
1. Fall of the Berlin Wall; 9th November 1989: Tilted the worldwide balance of power toward democracies and free markets.
2. Netscape IPO; 9th August 1995: Sparked massive interest (and over investment that would benefit us 10 years later) in fibre-optic cables.
3. Workflow software: Enables faster, closer co-ordination among far-flung employees.
4. Open sourcing: Self-organising communities, as demonstrated by Linux, launches a collaborative revolution.
5. Out-sourcing: Migrating business functions to India saved money and a Third World economy.
6. Off-shoring: Contract manufacturing elevated China to economic prominence.
7. Supply-chaining: Robust network of suppliers, retailers and customers increases business efficiency.
8. In-sourcing: Logistics giants take control of customer supply chains, helping 'mom & pop' shops to go global.
9. In-forming: Power searching allows everyone to use the Internet as a personal 'supply chain' of knowledge
10. Wireless: Enables pumped up collaboration, making it personal and mobile
Interesting snippets in the article: An eBay seller's positive rating can increase the winning bid price by up to 8%. Ten years ago, it was better to be 'average' in the West than to be born a genius in a developing country. That is no longer true.
Mentioned that, since publishing, he'd changed the title of #4 to Uploading: the ability for individuals to now contribute on the web. The cynics may argue he just said that because he was at Microsoft, viewed by many as poles apart from open source... He also appended '& the rise of Windows' to #1, saying that mass adoption of PCs running Windows enabled us all to become authors. Anyone who disagrees with that is likely to be a Mac user... :-)