• A population of 500,000 in a relatively small area, making it one of the largest cities in pre-industrial history
• Buildings made of stone
• Six-storey apartments
• Running water and a sewerage system conceptually not very different from ours’ today
• An ingeniously designed artificial harbour both for military and commercial use

Unfortunately Carthage got in the way of the Roman’ plans to control the narrow channel of water separating Sicily from Italy, the Strait of Messina. The Carthigians fought off the Romans for many years, but they had no allies, and ultimately could not match the Romans’ overwhelming military strength.

The fall of Carthage to the Romans saw hundreds of thousands of Carthigians perish in fire.

One thought that might spring to mind is how cruel victors were in ancient times. Why couldn’t the Romans and the Carthigians just be friends? What a waste of a great city.

Actually, things haven’t changed that much. Millions upon millions upon millions of people have died due to warfare in the twentieth century alone. To the ancients, besides the bombs, the fighter jets, the tanks and the guns, it would all be reassuringly familiar.

Before I discuss this book any further I would like to point out that it’s not a work of scholarship but of journalism. It’s akin to one very long Newsweek article. He travels, meets with influential people, does interviews, observes and opines. His clever use of analogies, buzzwords and snazzy subtitles make for interesting reading, but the core message is very simple. Essentially he’s telling us stories and anecdotes to illustrate what he thinks this new globalization is all about.

Mr. Friedman identifies three distinct phases of globalization. The first phase started when Columbus discovered America in 1492, lasting to 1800. Globalization 1.0 was about empires, power and natural resources.

The second phase was from 1800 to 2000. The Industrial Revolution and advances in transportation and telecommunications enabled multinational companies to have an increasingly global marketplace. The world become smaller as travel became easier - goods and services were exchanged all over the globe.

The previous two eras of globalization were about countries and then companies; since the year 2000, globalization has been about the empowerment of individuals. The “flat-world platform” is the term Mr. Friedman gives to the “phenomenon that is enabling, empowering, and enjoining individuals to go global so easily and so seamlessly”. This platform is the result of the convergence of the PC, fibre-optic cable ubiquity and work flow software.

This is how the story goes: there was the dot-com boom which saw a huge amount of investment in Internet infrastructure. The dot-com bust left a huge glut in fibre-optic cable capacity which resulted in very cheap broadband. At the same time, a shortage of software engineers in the western world meant that they were unable to fix the Y2K bug on their own. So this work was outsourced to India. Apparently the Indians did such a good job – at very competitive rates – that American companies decided to outsource software development and call centres to India on a permanent basis. (Mr. Friedman traveled extensively to India in the course of writing this book and talks about India a lot). At the same time, the emergence of VOIP (which enables cheap international calls) and advanced teleconferencing and videoconferencing hardware and software made the outsourcing of work to India that much more feasible. It’s a riveting story involving nerds, billions of dollars, technology, different peoples and cultures, underdogs, and paradigm shifts. In essence, Mr. Friedman would like to interpolate from the outsourcing industry in India to a whole new way of doing things.

Of course, it’s not just about India: it’s also about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the world wide web, the infamous Netscape IPO, the open-source software model, China as a manufacturing power, Wal-Mart (i.e., extreme supply-chaining), insourcing and “in-forming”. I’ll let Mr. Friedman explain more about the last two.

Insourcing:

“… If you own a Toshiba laptop computer that is under warranty and it breaks and you call Toshiba to have it repaired, Toshiba will tell you to drop it off at a UPS store and have it shipped to Toshiba, and it will get repaired and then shipped back to you. But here’s what they don’t tell you: UPS doesn’t just pick up and deliver your Toshiba laptop. UPS actually repairs the computer in its own UPS-run workshop dedicated to computer and printer repairs at its Lousville hub. I went to tour that hub expecting to see only packages moving around, and instead I found myself dressed in a blue smock, in a special clean room, watching UPS employees replacing motherboards in broken Toshiba laptops. Toshiba had developed an image problem several years ago, with some customers concluding that its repair process for broken machines took too long. So Toshiba came to UPS and asked it to design a better system. UPS said, ‘Look, instead of us picking up the machine from your customers, bringing it to our hub, then flying it from our hub to your repair facility and then flying it back to our hub and then from our hub to your customer’s house, let’s cut out all the middle steps. We, UPS, will pick it up, repair it ourselves, and send it right back to your customer.’ It is now possible to send your Toshiba laptop in one day, get it repaired the next, and have it back the third day. The UPS repairmen and -women are all certified by Toshiba, and its customer complaints have gone down dramatically.” (p. 168)

In-forming:

“In-forming is the individual’s personal analog to uploading, outsourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring. In-forming is the ability to build and deploy your own personal supply chain – a supply chain of information, knowledge, and entertainment. In-forming is about self-collaboration – becoming your own self-directed and self-empowered researcher, editor, and selector of entertainment, without having to go to the library or the movie theater or through network television. In-forming is searching for knowledge. It is about seeking like-minded people and communities …” (pp. 178-79)

So that’s the first half of the book. The rest talks about the economic, political, social and cultural impact that a flat world will have on America. Mr. Friedman goes on to dispense some prescriptions on how to survive and thrive in this flat world, which boils down to having imagination and being open to all sorts of new possibilities.

This book is very much from the point of view of an American who is concerned about the impact of Globalization 3.0 on his country. What about Malaysia?

For one, Malaysia has always been caught in the middle of globalization. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the Japanese have all colonized this land for our spices, rubber, tin and palm oil. Large numbers of Indonesians, Chinese and Indians have settled here. In the eighties and nineties, the Japanese came again, this time to utilize cheap and amenable blue-collar workers. The US has long been our largest export market.

I would say that Malaysia is still at Globalization 2.0. The Malaysian economy is pretty much dependent on foreign direct investment by multinational companies. The reason we can’t as yet go to the next level is because we lack that critical mass of world-class knowledge workers. As it stands things are still fine as long as we’re more productive and more cost effective than Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. These countries and other such countries around the world will soon start beating us at our own game. Then we’ll have to find a niche as some sort of regional hub for something, like how Singapore is for finance and Thailand is for car components. As individuals, to maintain the lifestyle to which we’re used, we’ll have to be not just good at what we do, but world experts at things not many other people do.

In conclusion, Mr. Friedman wants us to believe that the world has changed completely. It has – for a few thousand Internet millionaires; for a percentage of the population in India, China, Eastern Europe and East Asia reaping the benefits of outsourcing and offshoring; for laid-off blue collar workers in developed countries; and for those in the right place at the right time with the right skills. Otherwise it’s still somewhere between Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 for the rest of the world.

In essence, a great programmer consistently writes good code, fast. Ok, begging the question. Good code is flexible, structured, configurable, succinct, easy to maintain, and free of obvious bugs. (As no one is perfect, no code produced by one person can be completely bug-free).

So that’s the definition. How to measure the greatness of a programmer? Therein, dear reader, lies the rub. Code is the most abstract of all output. At the most basic level, of course, it either works or it doesn’t. But in itself, code is abstract precisely because it’s an abstraction, like maths. (In fact, it is maths - it comes under “discrete structures”).

In order to understand this further, let us compare programming with other types of endeavour. The most extreme end would be assembly-line kind of work. Everybody does the exact same thing in the exact same environment: Paul’s defect rate is 10 in 100, John’s is 15 in 100, and so on. Or: Paul can produce 100 widgets an hour, John can do 90 per hour.

Moving along the spectrum, there are types of work for which the output can be measured using a very clear metric, although no two environments are exactly the same. Sales (x number of closed deals per quarter), marketing (x% increase in market share year-on-year) and business (x% return on investment) are the most obvious examples.

It’s a bit harder to measure to any exact degree the greatness of lawyers, doctors and engineers, but still there are yardsticks. It would be number of cases won, number of patients treated, and number of projects completed on time and on budget, respectively.

Now, surely computer programs do have units of measurement of greatness, so to speak, no matter how approximate? Let us examine the usual suspects.

Lines of code? No.

Number of functions? No.

Number of bugs? Speed? Number of satisfied users? Herein, dear reader, lies another rub: By definition, no two software projects are the same; neither are two programming tasks within a software project. Similar sets of requirements would mean that the same software could be used for the other project, just modified a little bit, or even better, configured differently via a config file. It also wouldn’t make sense to give two programmers the same kind of thing to do, as it would lead to duplication of effort.

So that’s why nobody has yet to find a bulletproof way to do it: there is just no way to compare two programmers in any objective manner in real life, because their projects would be different, or their tasks would be different.

So how would we say that Paul is a better programmer than John?

Well, Paul seems to consistently be able to write better code than John, and faster. That’s what they all say, anyway.

Chapter 1: Good is the Enemy of Great

The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment. Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away … the good-to-great companies had no name, tag line, launch event, or program to signify their transformations. Indeed, some reported being unaware of the magnitude of the transformation at the time; only later, on retrospect, did it become clear. Yes, they produced a truly revolutionary leap in results, but not by a revolutionary process. (p. 11)

Chapter 3: First Who … Then What

The executives who ignited transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it. They said, in essence, “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If I get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.” (p. 41)

Chapter 4: Confront the Brutal Facts (Yet Never Lose Faith)

The Stockdale Paradox: Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. (p. 86)

Chapter 5: The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity Within the Three Circles)

1. What can you be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competencies. Just because you possess a core competence doesn’t necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.

2. What drives your economic engine. All the good-to-great companies attained piercing insight into how to most effectively generate sustained and robust cash flow and profitability. In particular, they discovered the single denominator – profit per x – that had the greatest impact on their economics.

3. What you are deeply passionate about. The good-to-great companies focused on those activities that ignited their passion. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate. (pp. 95-96)

Chapter 9: From Good to Great to Build to Last

… [I]t is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity. Indeed, if some of the comparison companies in our study are any indication, it involves less suffering, and perhaps even less work. The beauty and power of the research findings is that they can radically simplify our lives while increasing our effectiveness. There is great solace in the simple fact of clarity about what is vital, and what is not. (p. 205)

Google Reader doesn’t work on Opera 9.50, which is a shame. I hope Google fixes this soon. It’s a great browser.

Safari 3.1.2 for Windows doesn’t have a new tab button, and the fonts are fuzzy. According to ars technica, “Safari 3.1 for Windows continues to use the Mac OS X font anti-aliasing approach rather than the native font anti-aliasing system in Windows (ClearType).”

If you’re using Firefox 3.0, try the Basics 3.0.1 extension, which adds a new tab button on the left side of the tab bar.

So here goes.

Your dear toddler insists on drinking from a cup unassisted. So this is what you do: do not, repeat, do not fill it near to the brim as how you would for your own glass. Instead, fill it half full. Or better yet, only a quarter full. Their hands are still unsteady, so this way it won’t spill [1].

Er … what else. Well that’s it from me thank you and goodbye. Ha ha!

Notes

[1] Unless dear toddler is experimenting with gravity and turns the cup upside down. If you’re lucky it’s just plain water on your new carpet [1.1].

Notes on Notes

[1.1] No, they never do that on old, worn-out carpets.

Walking along the hallway at the office you see a colleague whom you don’t know that well. Both of you smile and say hi. During lunchtime you see him again, and both of you smile and nod at each other. Later, on the way to the washroom, you spot him coming the other way.

Now this is getting awkward. You’ve smiled, you’ve nodded; now what? You don’t want to look at the floor. Looking straight ahead stone-faced wouldn’t do either. Fortunately we all carry our mobile phones with us. So this is what you do: take your phone from your pocket, look at it intently and press a few random keys. It’s completely normal to SMS while on the move and no one would give it a second thought. Problem solved.

Since then I’ve picked up a few CSS hacks, but I still don’t feel completely equipped to deal with cross browser compatibility issues.

Today I came across this article: How to get Cross Browser Compatibility Every Time.

It looks quite complete. I’m earmarking it here for future use. Hopefully you’ll find it useful too.