The Challenge

The road ahead appears to be like this. There is still no match for Microsoft so far as reaching out to a computer illiterate is seen. Till that point, Linux is always under challenge from the comfort factor, upgraded every time by Microsoft. The next front comes to the big corporations who need to cut down their costs in order to compete with the market forces. This means that the Linux shall always find some backers till it keeps its efficiency levels high. The real playing ground is somewhere in the middle. This is the ground or zone of learning where the things really shape up. One of them has to focus at this area. If you really wish to challenge the monopoly of Microsoft then, tap the young- formula is the key. Linux learning is scarce, and it is pathetically limited to reactionary communities who are basically working with pre-set direction. If some part of this effort both money and manpower is channelled to open Linux learning centre, in countries like India and China. Then one can really see Microsoft sweating for its money. The key to this if there is special focus to language ability. That is programming in native languages such as Hindi in the case of India, or Mandarin in the case of China.

The Flat Earth? or a Fatigued One

I had just finished Friedman's colossal dream villa of flat earth imagined as a converging node of all waves and signals more geographically focussed to the US and its hegemony. And, to this humble service it finds India a most suitable choice of manpower who could be taken into its specific tasks that it needs to face the converngence of Russia, China or for that matter any possible combination of societal and popular imaginations and energies that it can thwart or so. The bigggest feeling is already conspicuous on the agenda of global warming and here it also finds India as suitable ally in shouldering most of it's resposibilities in this regard. The notion that technology is the sole saviour of the earth's burnt and bruised face, is just hypothetical just as any virtue, one can talk of. But, how this technology is going to be adapted and what are theosts of transition and who is going to bear it are the real social and political questions that one really has to take care of.
Friedman has taken too much optimistic attitude in this book called the World is Flat. There is no problem with the attitude but the real question is how and what are the texture of this flat earth. What constitutes this flatness for the people. Are the time-space gap transitions really sum up the whole thing as flat. Or, if there is so linear momentum of social and political relations across the territories that one can see that there is really flat earth more homogenised in is behaviour or communication. Truly, he is more convenient in proposition for he opts to ignore the frictional drags that are more prevalent than ever before. The heightening of state rowdiness and the flaring of communal and fundamentalist sentiments in democracies is an opposite indicator to this flat notion. And, no community would allow it self to be routed by such anarchical order of the middle ages.