Flat Earth

If you’re a fan of Tom Friedman’s "The World is Flat" as I am, you might find the following paragraph from a Wired article about the purchase of IBM’s PC division by the Chinese company Lenovo interesting. To me it sums up Friedman’s book in a few sentences.

Yet there’s more afoot here than the sale of an American icon to
Chinese owners. The purchase creates the first truly globalized – as
opposed to global – corporation. This will not be simply a business
with far-flung, disparate operations. Success depends on a truly
transnational approach to everything from merging cultures to the
making and selling of computers, one that brings together worldwide
talent and resources and combines them to pursue a larger goal. It’s a
confluence of forces – innovation, technology, and free markets – that
makes this moment possible. Isn’t this exactly the kind of IBM Thomas
Watson Sr., who in the 1930s pitched "world peace through world trade,"
would have wanted for the 21st century? Is this what globalization hath
wrought?

Amazingly, "globalized" companies may bring the world into a stability-inducing kind of interdependency a lot sooner than politics or culture change. I’m sure others would disagree.