Friedman's Triple Convergence-Shared knowledge is king

Friedman’s explanation of Triple Convergence suggests citizens of our global community have directly or indirectly created a group dynamic allowing each industry’s technology to work more efficiently within convergent  systems. ‘ HP, Cisco and Nokia collaborated on the development of a camera/cell phone which beams its digitized pictures to an HP printer, which quickly prints them out. Each company has developed a very sophisticated  technological specialty, but it could only add value when its specialty was horizontally combined with the specialties of the other two companies/ (Friedman, 2005, p. 178).  Utilizing the vastness and abundance of the internet, knowledge leaders created platforms that enhance globalization by implementing the ten flatteners that have leveled the playing field by creating a horizontal fast moving, ever evolving realm where analysts, programmers, engineers and production designers worldwide are constantly introducing new methods of ensuring consumers are having their needs meet by implementing, newer, faster and smarter machines.

 Foreign countries were able to interconnect, share information, trade, meet, create, innovate, research and develop new technologies, systems, platforms, social media, medical and computer devices to aid life, weapons to destroy it and others were created simply to make our lives easier. In recent years cloud computing and storage has taken center stage allowing large and small companies to store and backup large amounts of data without spending a considerable amount of money for servers or hard drives. Websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized how people communicate with friends across town or across the globe. Saving consumers billions in phone charges and miscellaneous fees for making long distance phone calls. In a free market where capitalism drives the American entrepreneurial spirit, with every technological advancement comes the desire to earn money from it. Example, Wi-Fi. When Wi-Fi or wireless fidelity first became widely known at the turn of the century every major carrier (AT&T, Sprint, T Mobile and Verizon) were trying to develop methods to make as much money from the new communication tool as they could. However, their path to even more riches was short lived once it became clear that unlike bottled water selling something that should be free and available to anyone was going to be difficult to capitalize on. Initially, restaurants, coffee shops, laundry mats and train stations were charging for Wi-Fi. However, once cell phones and  home routers with WiFi capability became widely available with their own wireless frequency hotspots, it has made it nearly impossible to seek financial reward from the use of organizations Wi-Fi. There is however one exception. On a recent trip to New York, I learned (the hard way) that airlines charge for wireless internet signals while in flight. The fees were outrages, $10.00 per hour was the cost to log on to one Wi Fi company. I was fuming (much like Friedman when he received his B labeled ticket from Southwest Airlines) when I learned that since I was a captive audience on a flight across the country I could not use my own wireless hotspot from my cell phone, I had to purchase the airlines Wireless Internet or else not have access. Obviously, there was no way I was going to pay $80 dollars to fly from New York to California simply to check out the latest basketball scores on ESPN (even if it was to see how my Creighton Blue jays were doing). I sat quietly and tried my best to sleep for the rest of my flight.  Hopefully, airlines could learn a lesson from small coffee shops and use  free Wi-Fi as an amenity for paying for flights. Such web based tools could certainly be used to benefit companies and their bottom line not only in terms leadership but increasing their edge over the competition.

References

The World Is Flat (A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century); Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005