Thomas Friedman visits Mexico and writes:

it definitely caught my ear when I started to hear two non-Spanish words on this trip that I'd never heard here before: "China" and "India." Mexicans are increasingly aware that these two countries are running off with jobs and markets that Mexicans once thought they owned. You have to feel sorry for the Mexicans: they are hearing "the giant sucking sound" in stereo these days — from China in one ear and India in the other. Worse, they seem stuck, unable to forge a coherent strategic response.

"We are caught between India and China," remarked Jorge Castañeda, the former Mexican foreign minister who just decided to run for president in 2006. "We have lost about 500,000 manufacturing jobs. It is very difficult for us to compete with the Chinese, except with high-value-added industries. Where we should be competing, in the services area, we are hit by the Indians with their back offices and call centers. . . . Not enough people here speak English." And that's not all. While China and India each send tens of thousands of students to be educated abroad every year in science and engineering, particularly in the U.S., Mexico sends just 10,000.

Mexico's problem, in a nutshell, is this: The world is flat — or at least getting flatter. Thanks to PC's, telecommunication advances and market-opening agreements, capital can seek out factories and knowledge workers anywhere in the world with greater and greater ease. To get itself in shape to sign the Nafta free-trade accord with the U.S. and Canada, Mexico did what I would call the "wholesale" reforms — and they have been incredibly impressive. It made a historic transition to freer markets and democracy, with respect for human rights and fair elections.

But with China attracting huge amounts of dollars to put its low-wage workers to work on all sorts of industrial exports, and with India now able to export its low-wage brainpower over phone lines and fiber-optic cables, Mexico's advantages in the U.S. market — its proximity and Nafta — are being eroded. Mexico can stay ahead only if it does "retail reforms."

These are the micro reforms that will make its economy more flexible and productive. The government has set out five areas for reform: labor markets; the judiciary; the constitution and electoral system; tax collection, which is abysmal; and opening the energy and electricity markets to foreign investors so a gas-rich country like Mexico gets out of the crazy situation of importing natural gas and gasoline from America.

While Mexico upgraded its competitiveness, notes the analyst Daniel Rosen in the journal The International Economy, China upgraded worker education, infrastructure, management skills, technology and quality controls even faster.

Will Rogers said it a long time ago: "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." Mexico has put itself on the right track. But for the moment, it's just sitting there. If it doesn't start moving again, it's going to get run over by China, India, America — or all of the above.

Barron's writes about IBM's plan to try and ensure the survival of its Power microprocessors:

At a New York City presentation on Wednesday, IBM announced it would allow anyone to freely download a bit of the once-proprietary specs for its Power microprocessors. Big Blue hopes that a Linux-like community of outsiders will design computing products around the Power chip -- products IBM hasn't thought of.

For 40 years, the chip industry has been able to speed up computing by shrinking transistors, said IBM chip developer Bernie Meyerson. But you can't make things smaller forever. Transistors are approaching a scale in which their features are the size of the atoms they're made of. "It's the most historic discontinuity that our industry has ever had," he told Wednesday's audience.

Instead of making a standard chip faster and faster, IBM says that designers will have to boost performance by adapting microprocessors to specific computing environments. IBM uses a special version of its Power chip in its Blue Gene prototype for a desktop supercomputer. Other variations will go into future products from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony.

By embedding its Power circuits in consumer products like gaming consoles, IBM hopes to reach the production volumes necessary to ensure that its Power architecture remains a contender. Intel's chips are finding their way from PCs into larger computers, and even networking gear. The "open source" software strategy of promoting Linux helped IBM overtake Sun Microsystems in the market for large computers. Now, IBM hopes that an "open chip" strategy will help the Power microprocessor survive in an Intel-dominated world.