Business Travel to Chile (Part 1)

I am now at a large size airport in Atlanta in transit from Tokyo to Santiago, Chile. Tokyo is far away from here. The journey from Tokyo took about 12 hours. My seat was a middle chair (in between an aisle seat and a window seat) in economy class, so there was little physical freedom when I was on the airplane.

In addition, I am suffering from jet lag. My departure time at Narita-airport was about 3p.m. local time, and my arrival time at this airport in Atlanta was about 3p.m. local time. My physiological function does are working well. For example, I am now feeling hungry, even though I ate my breakfast (or lunch, I do not care whichever the name is) a couple of hours ago. I am writing this document, while falling in an unconscious state and finding myself asleep several times.

The long flight was hard for my health, but there are a few good things. The most enjoyable experience was that I could see the movie “The Social Network” during the flight. The movie illustrates the humanity of Mark Zuckerberg. He is the co-founder of “Facebook.”, and is better known as a man who broke the record of the youngest billionaire in the world.

I am not deeply involved in social network services. I have not had any necessities/opportunities to do it so far, so I cannot grasp the essential points of why social networking services have become so popular. However, the movie provided me with sufficient suggestions.

The key point is “exclusivity.” Mark went to Harvard University, and there were several prestigious social clubs at the university. In order to become members of such clubs, you have to complete many selection processes. If you can finally gain the membership, you are exclusively allowed to socialize with the other members, and your prohibited friends are envious of you solely because you are the member of the club.

Mark was fortunate in that he could realize the eternal theory that people were seeking exclusive social networks. In addition, he has exceptional professional IT skills, so that he could implement his idea in the IT language.

In this sense, the success of Facebook is different from Google or Windows. The purpose of Google is to enable people to collect information efficiently and effectively on the Internet. Along the same lines, the purpose of Windows is to provide people with a technological foundation for IT systems. The success of Google and Windows is not rooted from sensitive human emotions such as the desire for socialization or envy of socialized people, but from a simple engineering slogan of “more efficient, and more effective.” The success of Facebook suggests one of future business blueprints.

My departure time in Atlanta will be 8p.m. local time, and the flight to Santiago will take about 9 hours. I have reserve an economy seat of the next flight as well. If I am asked from my business partners what the air travel is like in Santiago, I will try to answer, not that it was long, but I enjoyed the movies.