The First Four World Flattener's

I did mention in one of my last posts that I am currently reading Thomas Friedman's " The World is Flat." Well, today lets take a bird-eye's view on the first forces that have helped flatenning the world. Shall we ?
1) When the Berlin Wall went down and the Windows, up: - The Berlin wall went down in 1989 and than started a chain of events. The utter act of defiance from the people of Germany was not that of impulse. Freedom was what they wanted. But not only from the chains of discrimination, but of thought also. The downfall fall of Berlin wall took down the iron curtain with it. This opened the people's mind to imagine that a world in itself can become a single market place. Free trade started setting in. In admisdt of this, precisely a week later after wall's event, Microsoft shipped it's first operating system:Windows 3.0. This helped any tom-dick-harry harness the power of computers and gradually helped penetration of the computers in household's. People started realising the power of computing and the tasks that it made easier. They were on a run and they were loving it!
2) When Netscape came up with the first browser: - As thew power of computing became publicised, there was still a discrepancy. Those people complained that they cant share the resources on anyone else'e computer. What was needed was a common framework to help everyone acesss the a pool of resources. The when the internet came in to picture, there was no surefire way to access that data. A start-up company in silicon valley came up with the solution. Netscape. They built the first browser which again helped people access data and information thorugh the websites at the click of the button. Tim Berner-Lee , the father of World Wide Web, then brought another revolution that overnight shrinked the world.
3) When Workflow software started talking to each other:- After the internet boom, what was needed was the applications that can seamlessly integrate the business process. So that the Manufacturing, Finance, Sales and Inventory departements would be connected as they should be. This in turn give rise to data pipelines which helped transfer crucial data over long distances. I am not talking about cities but about countries. As the application began to come closer, connected by the web of pipelines, it didnt matter whether you were sitting in Boston or Bangalore. The work was done at the blink of an eye.
4) When Apache created the first open-source software: - Apache was the first open-source software that was created by a group of programmers. Open-Sourcing bought a new wave of revolution with itself. Here was bunch of geeks sitting, geographically diverese seeding the code to develop the software which can be freely downloaded and used. This actually was the people who had been shrking the world this time. The same is the case with LInux. The onlibe communities and blogs whic act as whistleblowers have transformed this daily people in the citizen-journalists. This in turn has given a new dimenesion to information mining.
We have more to come, so do visit back!