A link to this interesting article showing how India will soon surpass the USA as a World Tech center. It was sent in by Ian, Fletcher of the American Engineering Association with this note:
Concerning the story I just forwarded you, “Bangalore Besting Silicon Valley?” I’d like to make a point about the last few paragraphs, which discuss various factors that mitigate the harm outsourcing does. The problem with these mitigating factors is very simple: they can be quantified. If one accepts the generally-accepted presumption that exports create jobs and imports (including imports of professional services) cost jobs, then the obvious question is, do we have more imports or more exports? And the hard fact is that America has a trade deficit of $500 billion per year, so we are the losers in this game. Big-time.
Regards,
Ian Fletcher
VP, Gov’t Relations
American Engineering Association
www.aea.org
Bangalore Besting Silicon Valley
Is Bangalore finally going to replace California’s Silicon Valley as the world’s I.T. employment center? New statistics from the Indian city suggest that, yes, its legions of I.T. workers soon may outnumber those in the Bay Area.
Bangalore employs some 160,000 tech workers, the vast majority concentrated in value-added I.T. occupations, as opposed to call centers or business outsourcing. These figures are within striking distance of Santa Clara County’s I.T. employment rolls.
If sending 10 or 20 thousand jobs to India is good for a corporations bottom line result, why not just relocate the whole corporation?
Think about it. Microsoft announces it is offshoring the whole company from Redmond to Bangalore and buying HP and moving them into their new global Indian operations center. Carly and Bill hold a big joint news conference and talk about shareholder value and the global IT marketplace and everyone shakes their heads. Don’t worry, Bill and Carly know whats best!
Back in the USA, all the geeks and Linux people announce a new PC, built by IBM with Linux installed for about $200 and the thing is made in Redmond. Microsofts’ old HQ is now an IBM plant and Boeing is a big customer. Now this gets tricky for Dell, with Microsoft over in India now and the IBM Linux boxes driving down prices and Dells Windows machines aren’t selling real well at $400 a pop, even with the free printer and Works bundle. Now Mike has a choice, move the whole company from Texas over to India with Bill and Carly or just jump aboard and start offering a Dell Linux PC. Dell says, the hell with it and starts building IBM Linux compatibles and Microsoft and HP are stuck over in India peddling Windows machines around the Far East and looking for new markets in neighboring Pakistan. The Russians at this point are now all running Linux and Dell is building a plant Moscow in a joint venture with HP. The Indians finally get sick of the Bill show and all the Softies and kick them out of India and Microsoft relocates to Afganistan and starts to rebuild the country and creates the new capital city of Gateselore, a city totally run by software operating on old X-Boxes networked with Windows XP. In India, they are building their own PC’s and running Linux and exporting them to the USA, Europe and Russia and keeping all the money they earn.
I don’t have a problem with outsourcing per se. My issue is that our government is basically encouraging the use of foreign labor through the H1-B visa program. If outsourcing is such a great solution, then there shouldn’t be a need for the H1-B program whatsoever.
Coming back to outsourcing, does it not seem that we are outsourcing intelligence so that it can be managed by monkeys?
There are additional relevant points:
1. Currently, tax breaks encourage outsourcing. That means the federal government comes down on the side getting rid of American jobs. Why should anyone who works for a living [in the USA] vote for creeps who don’t care about your job?
2. The Editors at PC Mag tippy-toe around this one; but, I think the most significant factor in the decline of tech support is offshoring to lowered standards — to get that cheaper labor. After 21 years of being a loyal Microsoft customer, I’m switching every system I can get my hands on to OpenOffice and Mozilla. 4 phone calls to MSoft tech support with non-answers, 2 promised call-backs that never happened — plus I yanked out my MSoft wireless home network when I was ready to upgrade to faster than 80211.b