Each month, as we reach the end of the publication cycle for the print version of WebSphere Journal, a conversation ensues about the nature of this column, "Final Thoughts." What should it be, who should write it, should it address daily reality or long-term thinking, how technical should it be, etc.?

Last month, the column's author launched into a pseudo-philosophic discussion about the nature of a sphere and how it shapes our metathoughts as we create our company's IT architecture, infrastructure, and daily procedures. It's interesting to see that the column was published just as a new book called The Earth is Flat was being readied for global distribution. This book promises to carry some influence in the coming months and years, as its author is well-known and its premise just the sort of contrarian weltanschauung that media pundits and business leaders love to dissect and discuss.

The only problem is that the earth is round, or rather, spherical. A flat earth doubles the distance between many places, say, Silicon Valley and India, or New York and China. Go ahead and say that the book's author didn't mean his title to be a literal statement. Even taken metaphorically, the flat-earth conception implies an abstraction, i.e., a map, that envisions things quite different from what they are. Mercator and countless others have struggled with this idea for centuries.

Organizations have become flatter, true, but this trend has been in evidence for at least 20 years. There is nothing fundamentally new about eliminating management layers, getting closer to customers, and using IT to do so. The fact that web service development environments and SOAs are the latest way (and most powerful so far) to address this trend only highlights the fact that the concept of flatter organizations is increasingly mature.

But the world is not flattening. The concept is facile, misleading, and just plain wrong. And whether using words to write code or to write books, you have to get it right.

Cultural differences among certain classes of businesspeople, technologists, academicians, and teenagers have been rounded off, perhaps. The rapid rise of the blogosphere has enriched the volume and increased the signal level of our global public conversation. And ever-increasing outsourcing and offshoring has certainly stretched supply chains, but at a cost of seriously sleepless nights when an old-fashioned labor slowdown or barge accident at a major port can threaten to bring a serious percentage of the global economy to a grinding halt.

The world is not flat, and it's not getting flatter. It's getting better connected, and it's getting rounder, as we move to a non-stop, 24-hour business cycle that circles back on itself at whatever arbitrary time has been selected for you, depending on your time zone.

In that spirit, this column can never truly provide Final Thoughts. No such thing anymore. As implied at the top of this column, we've reached the end of another production cycle for this magazine. But yet, we haven't. The online version of this and other SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com) publications is continuously updated, and the content of our print versions is conceived within this context, not as a separate entity or product line.

Any thoughts we have time to think may be the last thoughts we have in any particular day, but they are hardly final. Our world is multidimensional, hardly flat, and not getting any flatter. How about yours? Send us your ideas for this column. We are looking for our readers' conceptions of the universe, as well as their daily reality. (Send your ideas to roger@sys-con.com). We need to know, how flat is your world, and how final are your thoughts?