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Dot ComBack, Or More Of The Same?
adamsmith_uk writes "The FT features Wall Street's renewed love affair with dotcom stocks on Monday with the latest in a $6bn string of acquisitions that has helped set light to the once-defunct online commerce sector. Could this be the signs of the tech ComBack ?" But hold onto your hopes; ekarjala writes "According to this CNet article, a recent survey by theInformation Technology Association of America indicates that IT hiring in the US is expected to remain flat or decline slightly over the course of 2003. The main drivers are lack of demand for IT products/services and outsourcing IT functions offshore."
Who fails to see how a buncha people buying/selling shares will determine if a company sells things or not?
Its not a comeback for some, just some more growth: Not all those DotComs were DotBombs. Look at Ebay, quite possibly one of the most successful internet businesses ever.
Looks like someone's got their eyes on Slashdot.
Up 22% today...Hmmmm.
(Yes that's right, Slashdot's ticker symbol is LNUX)
Your not... you're a student, you're sposed to either work for a Prof, or flip the big macs while volunteering your time to projects so you can build a portfollio/resume and have something to set yourself apart once you do graduate.
There's a new group of companies that are doing a lot of the same things as the original dotcoms did, they're just not hiring 100 people to implement online want ads or make an invitation web page. A small amount of individual angel investors are willing to sink a couple hundred grand into starting a small company now that you need something better than a business plan drawn on a napkin. Most are under 10 people and either profitable or have immediate revenue.
It's not like 1998-2001 showed that internet-based companies can't be successful, it just showed that you don't need to be a publicly traded company to sell mail-order dog food.
can be found in my little rant in this thread right here.
Back in the day, before globalization, before the demise of family-wage jobs, before the unions were smashed flat there were other possibilities.
One of the purposes of tariffs and trade agreements, back in the day was to keep jobs from leaving the country.
But that day is past. The race to the bottom has been enshrined not merely as a matter of current policy but the cornerstone of international law (cf. GATT, NAFTA, WTO and so on). Here in the States most educated White men vote Republican. Most IT people educated White men. If we voted against our best interests we have nobody but ourselves to blame.
Early on we thought that we would be safe. Steel and textiles might go overseas, but not high-tech. Then semiconductors moved away. And consumer electronics. That's alright, we said, the engineering and design, the programming and the day-to-day business of managing information will stay here. They followed. Because jobs like those are even easier to move - you don't even have to absorb the fixed costs of a factory, just phone lines.
And the jobs that stayed? Wages are sinking there because we weren't politically active. We let the big employers pervert the H1-B visa program EXPLICITLY to cut our wages and job security.
The action by Sun employees to fight back against job destruction fell off the screen. Largely because we didn't keep attention on it.
So look for a recovery in the IT industry. But don't ever look for a recovery in salaries or security. At least not until people pull their heads out and undo the disastrous effects of the Reagan "revolution" and its sequels.
For a couple good if older references take a look at "America, What Went Wrong" and "America, Who Really Pays the Taxes".
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Lets just pretend that this dotcom come back is really happenning and there is no possibility that it won't.
Did the rookies and experienced dotcommers learn anything from their experiences or those of others; or, will they do the same thing - make a little money, think they're all that (no offense to all you failed dotcommers) and hire people to do things they could easily do themselves and buy a bunch of equipment they have no need for? Thus putting them into dept which they will never recover from and putting their dotcom on that big server in the sky.
A few years ago, pundits said anyone who didn't perceive the internet's magical power to mint money "just don't get the internet."
Shortly before the first dotcom boom went bust, I saw an enthusiastic stock analyst on one of the financial news shows. He defended his extravagant valuations of companies that had never made a profit and had never articulated when or how they intended to start making a profit. Profit and loss statements and P/E ratios were archaic and obsolete relics of the old economy, he said. "Now it's all about branding."
Who didn't get it?
It's likely that the bust left some tech stocks undervalued. There may be some bargains to be had. There are undoubtedly opportunities for real businesses that figure out that the interenet, like the telephone company, lets a company communicate with its customers. That doesn't change the fundamental fact that a company still needs to find some way to actually make money.
(Personally, I don't think we've let all the hot air out of the bubble yet. Time will tell.)
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
Political correctness is all well and good, but don't let it blind you to reality. I'm getting the bulk of my telemarketing calls from Newfoundland and India (try asking sometimes, before you hang up), and calls for support seem to be going out of country too. How much of the stuff you buy says Made In USA on it these days?
Of course the IT industry isn't immune. We ought to fix things by requiring companies who use foreign labor to pay equivalent U.S. for each overseas position into a fund used for improving living conditions in the countries these companies are abusing (or similar causes).
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
"These are jobs that should be available to citizens of the U.S."
Why?
The thing is, 'sending jobs overseas' is seen as negative. Why is that? Why shpould they be saved for US citizens?
If I fixed your job (and, if extended to everyone then everyone's job) for life, you would get no productivity increases. You would therefore get no pay rises. Where are the increases in revenue for your job if everyone is like you?
Research would achieve nothing, as if everyone is fixed, we'll never have anyone to increase productivity.
So... if you don't want jobs sourced overseas, then equally expect no change in job, no productivity increases, no economic growth.
Do not earn more than your father... be condemned to a life of what has been achieved before.
The shame is, economists post Ricardp have realised... IF YOU OUTSOURCE YOUR JOB TO SOMEONE WHO CAN DO IT CHEAPER (not only increasing their standard of living) YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ELSE EVEN MORE PRODUCTIVE (unless you are a leech upon your workforce and refuse to change). This ACCOMPANIED WITH DISCOVERY (research) results in ECONOMIC GROWTH.
Sorry for so many caps... just ppl either don't understand basic common sense or are so lazy they want to preverse their present position without thinking al all.
Part of the web revolution was supposed to be low overhead. Guess what, low overhead also means less workers. There's simply no reason, when you're focused on-line, to hire a marketing guru, HR guru, caterer, DJ, masseuse and all that other useless crap the .coms got into. What's being found out is these days you have one guy doing five different jobs and he'll do it, because he's paranoid about getting laid off. Did you know all the cool logos that change every day at Google are done by one person? Back in the day, you would have hired an entire design department, each person earning 70K to do that. Seriously. Times have changed ... for the better, in some ways.
I remember back in the 80's every body who was working on the assembly lines making cars was freaking out because the jobs were moving to asia, namely, Japan. People thought the US would be owned by Japan in a decade.
I take two things from that experience. First, bitching about your job being lost to someone somewhere else for less is futile. It's gone, the company holds the keys to your job, not you. Corporate America cares only about profit and if you and your union job costs ten times what a worker in some third world country will charge; too bad for you. This will never change; politics is corrupt. Hate to break it to you but it's time to move onto a new line of work. So be flexible. Don't expect you'll have one career your whole life. Second, the mighty can and will fall and there is always something else that will rise to take the place of the old. Right now people are scared that India or China will become some economic powerhouse and rule the world ... like the Japanese were supposed to. Didn't happen. Some people are predicting the US economy will run out of steam like we were supposed to in the 80's, or end up like Japan today. I wouldn't bet on it. A turnaround will come from somewhere. Just be ready to work when it happens.
Get back to me in a year and let me know how it went. The two cases of outsourcing overseas I know of first-hand were a total money pit. One of them they finally cancelled the whole thing after throwing $2 million towards India. They eventually did the logical thing: Wrote the damn thing themselves.
Vietnam? Like I said, let me know how it goes.
Very interesting. Welcome to the real New World Order. Turns out software coding is a skill which can be easily taken on by developing economies. Skills which earned six figures only a couple of years ago can be bought for $1 per hour. Now that's some unfettered free-market competition for you! LOL.
Also, as mentioned in earlier threads on different stories, there are a few real profit-generating (though I think overvalued) companies (eBay & the like) that have a proven business model and have expressed stable, steady growth.
People will still be "eBaying", or something like it in 20 years.
People in 20 years will still go to the grocery store and not buy their groceries online. It's inefficient, and to me represents the sheer economic waste that went along with the dot.bomb.
And will anyone be paid $100/hour to make crappy webpages ever again? I don't think so.
In an industry where you find it neccessary to have a room full of people scanning medical documents into computers - yeah, outsource that to some other country. It's difficult or impossible to find that many Americans willing to work even minimum wage to do that day in and day out.
But what about the recent examples wherein a bank has an older system and a team of people who have been programming it for thirty years? They realize that soon these people are going to start to retire and want things like retirement and so forth, plus they want increasing pay scales as time goes on. Instead, fire them all (lay them off) and outsource to India. You pay the Indian workers less and you don't have to worry about retirement benefits for the tons of people you just fired. This is what people are afraid of.
Plus the modded-down poster said "jobs that should be available to citizens of the U.S." - probably what he really wants to mean is that there are a number of jobs right out of college that can either go to U.S. Citizens or foreigners needing things like sponsorship. It seems like a bad idea to some to sponsor foreigners when so many U.S. citizens are without jobs at the moment.
Schnapple
I love the crowd that thinks the economy has been growing at all.
t ml?type=e conomicNews&storyID=2684060
Fortunately, the numbers are on my side. April saw growth of the service sector:
http://reuters.com/financeNewsArticle.jh
If it were growing, TAX REVENUES WOULD BE GROWING IN KIND.
What tax revenues? Sales tax? Is it not clear from the previous discussion that jobs (and therefore consumer spending) are late to pick up after a recession?
Property tax? Housing values are down, but some of that is the large numbers of houses on the market because of the wonderful interest rate situation. Not necessarily a problem with the economy, or an indicator of retraction.
Income tax? How often do you pay taxes? Do you suppose that would track the economic performance of last month?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
All protectionist tariffs do is protect a certain segment of the economy (those who make things domestically that are imported and therefore tariffed) at the expense of those who buy them (by making those goods more costly in the market) and those who export goods (scarcity of your currency in foreign markets drives up the value of your currency in relation to other currencies, making export goods less attractive.).
Ahh, a college student. He still thinks the fundamental aspect of an economy is based on the scarcity of goods.
As has been said countless times here and elsewhere, the United States once funded its entire government with tarriffs, and that was when the country was most free. From a purely economic standpoint, tariffs are perhaps a bad idea. But we don't care about economics. We realize that right now, wealth and prosperity is acquired by this thing we call "work". We can't have a society where there is no work, otherwise what the fuck is the point of living? The community is the reason we exist.
The laws of supply and demand work for people too. Right now, the demand for human ingenuity and artistic vision is very very low, so the majority of people are corporate/government bureaucrats, impotent university drones, or modern day servants. This is not a society of which we should be proud. I mean, look at yourself. Maybe if it was your job, your family, your house, on the line you would think a little differently. Do we really want a society where grown men act like children reading ridiculous economics books until they are 30 years old? How is that life?
My advice to you, is get your head out of the economics book and learn a little bit about human nature of life. Your senseless faith in the cult of efficiency that is economics is a disservice to your humanity and society as a whole. We don't need people for purely productive purposes, we have more than enough people to produce whatever we could possibly desire. Lets give our own people that work.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
...will be when broadband wireless access is universal, very cheap (or free), and "always-on".
When your phone, PDA, notebook, computer, watch, gameboy, or whatever can instantly access the internet, anytime, anywhere, and at high-speed then the flood gates will open.
We're not there yet, but it's not far off.