It’s really incredible when you think of how the Internet has expanded the reach and ability of our conversations. Information can spread through the world at the speed of light, and we’re more empowered to connect and to share because of it. That creates the possibility for a radically new world, unprecedented in all of history. When we can connect with such ease, we can have a conversation. When we can have that conversation, we can discover synergies, and explore working together. When we work together on such a global scale, well… the potential is exponential.

That’s how Jim Ware over at the Future of Work Weblog put it, and I couldn’t agree more. He pointed to the most recent Wikipedia gaffe, where people swarmed in to edit an article with fictitious information, as indicative of “the dark side of collaborative technology”, and of “the dangers of remote collaboration with strangers”.

First, I’d be wary of calling it “the dark side of collaborative technology”. After all, it’s not collaborative technology that is the problem, but anonymous collaboration itself. I do agree that the nature of anonymous, remote collaboration creates opportunities for abuse. Indeed, there’s less of a deterrent against abuse when you don’t think anyone will know it was you. That’s a real-world concept widely applied.

Is the IT outsourcing boom over? One independent study seems to think so.

From one article that nicely summarizes:

Companies are reining in outsourcing since they either mistakenly outsourced a process or function that is core to their business and are now bringing it back in-house; their provider over-promised and under-delivered; or the complexity of managing and measuring outsourcing projects and relationships overshadowed the benefits, reasons [a principal at the management consulting firm that produced the study].

Geographically distributed product development is continuing to take hold.

From an article I came across (via the excellent Future of Work Weblog):

The new flagship mouse that Logitech will announce this fall is truly an international beast. The mechanical engineering and design took place in Ireland; electrical engineering in Switzerland; corporate marketing, software engineer- ing and quality assurance at the company’s Fremont, Calif., headquarters; tooling in Taiwan; and manufacturing in China.

Mega corporations, those huge companies that try and do everything and anything under one roof, are going the way of the dinasour, and are being replaced by smaller, more agile businesses that are able to respond quickly to market changes. And many companies are in the process of reinventing themselves.

It’s no longer about top-down command and control, where layers of management are necessary to relay orders from the top through to the people actually executing. Instead, a more horizontal approach is taking hold, where each member of a company understands and owns their role, and has more decision making freedom.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) recently released a comprehensive report on the state of the 50 least developed countries. It highlights the economic forces and trends affecting these countries and dives into a slew of economic data I won’t even try to understand.

The overall picture is that while these least developed countries (LDCs) have made record progress as a whole, they are still wrought with enormous challenges. The progress they have made isn’t necessarily sustainable, and the productivity gap is widening.

A recent eWeek article (July 24th, 2006) reports on how escalating wages are squeezing profit margins for Indian outsourcers. The current compounded annual growth rate for salaries is 12 percent in India versus 4 percent in the United States. There’s also a high turnover rate as local outsourcers compete for talent, both with each other and with companies like IBM who have set up shop there. Further, training costs are high, with many Indian outsourcers saying that Indian universities must do a better job of educating the workforce so that they can avoid exorbitant sums spent on training. One customer mentioned in the article brought their product development operations back to the United States from India, citing little to no cost savings when all was said and done.

I came across an excellent piece in the journal Scientific American (April 2006 issue), by a certain Pranab Bardahn, economics professor at the University of California, that takes a comprehensive look at the forces of economic globalization and how it affects the world’s poor — does it help them or hurt them?

Bardahn’s closing sentences really put the article in context:

Simplistic antiglobalization slogans or sermons on the unqualified benefits of free trade do not serve the cause of alleviating world poverty. An appreciation of the complexity of the issues and an active interweaving of domestic and international policies would be decidedly more fruitful.

The practice of outsourcing, the doling out of certain business processes often to low-cost labor in developing nations (commonly referred to as offshoring here in America) has been known to stir heated debate centered around the notion that Americans are losing their jobs to other countries. It’s been a hot-button political issue in recent election cycles, and has received intense media coverage.

All said, I believe the world is coping with transition as it deal with the realities of our time. As the world is increasingly connected and our lives interdependent, a global free market must prevail. Sure, that’s oversimplified, and the debate on all sides of the issue is healthy as we struggle to understand these new realities. Woven, with its focus on tools to support global collaboration, is of course right in the middle of this issue, and we’ll continue to analyze and to learn.

Time magazine devoted a recent cover to India. A series of articles hilite its rise as an economic superpower, painting a picture of a country fueled by hope and ambition and at the same time plagued by daunting challenges.

There is a feature article on Mumbai (also known as Bombay), the country’s sprawling metropolis and site of the recent bombings (the magazine hit the stands just weeks before the bombing), as the city that really embodies India’s ambition.