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Oracle To Add R&D Centers In China
stoborrobots writes "Reuters is reporting that the big O is planning to open new R&D centres in china. Initially aiming at the domestic Chinese market, there is potential to resell the technologies developed beyond the borders... Is this the next wave of outsourcing?"
... We are foolish not to use all our sway to move to Open Source solutions in our companies and to develop Open Source Software.
OSS is no longer an ideology, it is fiscal self defense for programmers and IT professionals in general. Open Source allows us to start our own businesses offering support and design services without the middle man of large software companies that will always seek to downsize us to cheaper people.
I'm sure others may disagree, but this is the way I see things.
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As an analogy, IBM's research lab in India is focussed on making eGovernance solutions, machine translation solns from/to Indian languages, Hindi speech reco etc.
Also, it goes without saying that it adds to the overall prestige of Oracle as well.
Jeez folks, get out of this recent small-town myopia about outsourcing. You can do better than that. Dell's a good example of how excellent US industry can be if you shrug off yesterday's models and try to be genuinely different and quality-focussed, instead of regressive and protectionist.
If you complain about outsourcing you're merely buying into politician's agendas, effectively giving them an easy platform of "Vote for me and I will protect your jobs". Make great stuff and you don't need protectionism. And if you really value a free market, restrictions should be the last thing on your minds anyway.
The world is a tiny place now, you shouldn't be thinking about "keeping jobs at home" any more than you'd think about extracting all your raw materials from home too. That's not today's world. You can't compete on the basis of labour cost, that should be obvious; you need to be better.
Globalization of both the markets and the production has been immense in recent decades, and no megacorp can afford to chain itself down with yesterday's small-town views nor barriers against free flow of resources.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
There is one thing that can't be outsourced. Culture.
Don't be so sure. People are surprisingly quick to adopt the cultures of others.
That happens to be one of Radical Islams greatest fears: cultural imperialism. Our ideas about freedom have been called "Murderous Germs".
From an article about the origins of fundamentalist Islam:
In his essay "Between Yesterday and Today," Banna [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood] wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with "their murderous germs":
"They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with
their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their
stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and
their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic
civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants. "
The Brotherhood's slogan was, and remains, "God is our objective; the Koran
is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and
death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations."
Or how about Osama's Letter to America:
(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.
(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.
[snip]
(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.
[snip]
Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
If culture couldn't be outsourced, terrorists would have must less to be angry about.
Oracle outfits companies around the globe. They advertise themselves as a global company. If they open local office, it's hardly outsourcing.
If my company in New Zealand, or Canada, or wherever, made a billion dollars in the states, and decided it was time to open up a US office,would be out sourcing? Don't be so fucking greedy.
People fear outsourcing, but the powers that be say "Nah! Don't worry about that. See the Chinese and the Indians will only do what they're good at which is mindless repetitive labor, and we Americans will what we're good at which is innovating!" That argument hasn't been working, and it's obvious why. It's a simplisitc attempt to appeal jingoism and racism. Implicit in that argument is "They're too stupid to do thinking jobs, not like us." That's bullshit, and this move by Oracle proves it.
The other myth about "free trade" is that it's all or nothing. You have to let companies import and outsource everything, otherwise you're economy will tank. That has never been the case, and it never will be.