2006: The Year of Living Globally

Trade across international boundaries isn’t new. Multinational corporations aren’t new. Yet, it seems, globalization is new.

Although international commerce has been going on since the beginning of civilization, what’s different now is instant communication between scattered locations that makes an office on the other side of the world look like it is next door.

That enables Hewlett-Packard, for instance, to set up an accounts payable operation for Procter & Gamble in Bangalore, India, to process invoices from French perfume makers to be paid from British bank accounts.

For more on a related topic, see The Real Impact of Globalization

The global nervous system that makes this web of relationships possible is the result of the bandwidth glut celebrated in Thomas Friedman’s best-selling book, “The World is Flat.”

Fiber-optic pipelines overbuilt during the dot com boom, and dark after the dot com bust, have been lighted up with the world’s data.

Read the full story on eWeek.com: 2006: The Year of Living Globally

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