The Most Significant Flattener

By far, the most significant flattener is Netscape and the company's influence on the world wide web. Netscape opened the door to every flattener that came after it. As Friedman talks about in his speech at Yale, Netscape opened the doors to internet browsers and actually created the first one. With internet browser's people could now search for whatever they are looking for with a simple sentence or even just a couple words. The information that we can find with a single search is incredible. If you need to know something you use and internet browser. Nowadays we use other browser's like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome, but Netscape contributed the start to each one of those browser's and without Netscape, those probably wouldn't exist.

Netscape not only opened the doors to internet browser's it also commercialized a set of open transmission protocols so a single company could not dominate over the entire internet system. This is very important because we see domination in nearly everything else. Wal-Mart and Target are dominating the sale of inexpensive household goods, foods, and clothes. Home Depot and Lowes are dominating the home repair market. Could you imagine having two or three companies controlling what was put on the internet and what had to stay off? How much less information we would have available at our fingertips if that happened? The lack of communication we would suffer if those companies ever targeted a whole country to block out. With everyone able to post, share, discuss, inform, sell, buy, and trade equally over the internet we are granted one of the greatest things we will ever get: Ability. If you want to start your own company completely off the internet, you have the ability to do that. If you want to tell everyone how great your family history is, you have the ability to do that. If you want to talk about how much you hate the New York Jets, you have the ability to do that. Everyone does and now, thanks to Netscape, always will.

The last thing Friedman talks about is the .com boom that Netscape triggered. This is what really connected us to other countries, other communities, other businesses, other students, and other friends. Without the .com boom we would have a lot harder time getting a hold of anyone overseas. We would still be trying to connect through phones, and when there is a 12 hour time difference between you and your contact it can really make it much harder to go about you business as normal. It is truly incredible the amount of information that Netscape has allowed us to find at the touch of our fingertips.