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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?"
Yes.
My blog
... 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.
The US has some fairly daunting nuclear non-proliferation export controls on software and hardware to nations such as China. Larry Ellison, a heavy contributor to the Democratic Party, might be encountering difficulty in obtaining the necessary export licenses, so maybe this is a workaround for those export controls.
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from Chinese workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in China, or worse, in a Chinese company coming back to compete against Oracle in the States?
Just a question.....
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
That's a much bigger deal than just outsourcing. It says alot about how clever Oracle thinks those from the US are.
Perhaps too many grow up thinking they ought to be playing tennis or being musicians. Those are the most important people, right?
Those are the images the media gives them, so it must be true.
sadly, the average IQ of people who believe statistics like this is only 45. (you believe me, don't you?)
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
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.
What protection does Oracle have from Chinese workers stealing their intellectual property and using it in China, or worse, in a Chinese company coming back to compete against Oracle in the States?
Hopefully, no protection whatsoever.
Oracle competes on excellence and through continuous improvement and customer satisfaction. The day that they call for protectionism is the day that they've started resting on their laurels and deserve to die.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If you've ever had to create an Oracle application with support for Chinese you know that it's quite an ordeal. The core of the database just isn't suited for a language that, among other things, doesn't have spaces.
It makes perfectly sense to open an R&D department in China, since there's a huge market there, and of course Oracle wants to fully support chinese.
Underholdning.info
the 'big Oh' notation in computer science. What were you thinking about :-p ?
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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.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. You've never used Oracle, have you?
The day that they call for protectionism is the day that they've started resting on their laurels and deserve to die.
They've been resting on their laurels for a long time now. Oh, the core database product is good enough. But the little bits around the edges that make a polished product are just completely absent with Oracle. It comes across as an amateurish and half finished program. And given that they've had 20 years and billions of dollars to get it right, there really is no excuse for that.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Dell operates on the same model as McDonald's. They do a little QC on the cheapest crap they can get their hands on and advertise. Most people, it seems, have been happy eating "downer cows". That and an economy built on pure service might be good enough for you, but I want the freedom to do more.
If you complain about outsourcing you're merely buying into politician's agendas ... 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.
No, I don't buy it and yes I demand free markets.
The real protectionism is in "IP" laws. Restrictive licensing prevents people from actually rating Oracle's databases so comparison is impossible. Worse, I can't compete against Oracle if they get a bunch of bogus software patents. It is only that kind of government protection that makes the logistic headaches of outsourcing possible. In a free economy, most of the current big dumb companies would have been toppled by smaller smarter competition long ago.
As it is, the big dumb companies survive and feed off each other. The average American worker continues to suffer M$ desktops, mergers and layoffs while their overpaid executives pad their salaries with bonuses from all the money they have "saved" by eliminating their competition, auction proceeds and offshoring. The whole thing is a crock and represents the end of a long corporate looting spree.
The "service" economy was a lie. The US will quickly become a backwater if it fails to make things other people want. Some people were dumb enough to think that we could simply provide the world with "brains". The definition of "brains" is swiftly being reduced to ownership of ideas that citizens of other countries are increasingly having.
The ownership strategy is ultimately bankrupt. It amounts to enslavement of the rest of the world, a very unAmerican idea to begin with. It's also impractical. Our ability to level ownership taxes will die as other countries inherit and improve our former technical excellence.
The hogs running US mega corp and the US government could care less. They are getting theirs while the rest of us are getting the shaft.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Who cares about a crap closed-source database?
Crap? Before you sound off about a product you should make an effort to have even the vaguest notion of what you are talking about. Those of us that work with databases professionally know and appreciate what the likes of Oracle can do for us that the current OSS alternatives simply cannot. I would love to see a free and open database be able to compete with Oracle on a terrabyte scale but we simply aren't there yet.
It's ok to be an OSS fan, but for the love of god stay grounded, man!
Outsourcing is contracting part of your work to another company.
That is the _only_ definition.
You can rant all you like about IP, protectionism, and off shore jobs, but it still doesn't change the fact that opening a branch in another country is _not_ offshore outsourcing. Even if you do fire everyone in the original country.
You might well call it off-shoring - Though I would call it relocating - but you most certainly can not call it off shore outsourcing.
Some facts people need to learn (this portion is not necesarily a reply to twitter's post).
Outsourcing does not imply off-shoring.
Employing people in other countries is not outsourcing.
Outsourcing is not evil.
Offshore outsourcing is not evil.
Outsourcing (whether or not it's offshore) can sometimes be beneficial, but only if you're outsourcing a complicated, time or resource consuming process that is not your core business to a company that specialises in it.
Outsourcing can also cause problems - it adds extra red tape and process when you want to make changes, and if you've outsourced to an off shore company, then timezones and langauge add to that problem.
Outsourcing your core business is almost always a bad idea - there's no way you can possibly offer a service that competes on both price and features if you're reselling someone else's service. It logically follows that another company could just perform that service without the extra layer, and be able to adapt faster than you, and be more flexible on pricing.
But outsourcing in general is not a bad thing, and is something that should be allowed to continue, even off shore outsourcing.
By the way - the bit about the US not getting UK music is more of a problem for the US then anything else. Sure, the UK acts are missing out on the larger market, but the US audiences are missing out on good music, and the resulting cutural variety.
Musicians can do quite very well for themselves never having been in the USA - we don't need you.
There are an awful lot of Australian acts over the years that have been extremely successful by only being popular in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
However, that has nothing whatsoever to do with outsourcing, off shoring or off shore outsourcing.
Advanced users are users too!
"Most people think that China will be the "Next India" when it comes to IT/BPO, but there are lots of reasons why they won't be . . . "
all interesting facts, all (probably?) true, and all beside the point.
None of those facts matter to the people who make the outsourcing decisions. Price DOES matter.
Proof: all of your observed "advantages" of India (over China) are even more applicable to the locally-based programmers whose jobs are being outsourced. But those advantages haven't prevented their jobs being lost to the lowest bidder.
Furthermore, I'm not even sure that you're right about the Indian culture making for better programmers:
-- who invented gunpowder?
-- which of those two countries was the first to acquire nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, etc.?
-- which of those two **ethnic** groups has shown greater success in technology? (hint: think Taiwan)
-- and finally, what difference does language etc. make, when labor is so cheap that you can outsource virtually the entire I.T. department?
This entire "culture" thesis reminds me of how some WWII Americans said that Japanese would be inferior fighter pilots -- because their feet wouldn't reach the pedals.
For about half of the 185 nations that appear in the book, no studies are available. In those cases, the authors estimated by taking averages of the IQs of surrounding nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
.. and Oracle sure could use it. Perhaps the Chinese will *finally* make Oracle not be a pain to install and maintain.
It's almost laughable when you contrast Oracle with, say, Postgres. Apart from running the RPM command, all you have to do to get Postgres running publicly is edit two files in its config directory, one to turn on tcpip sockets and the other to tell it what authentication method to use. There's no monstrous pages out there with hundreds of errors comprising a very incomplete set of "how to deal with a few of the most common postgres installation problems" like there is with Oracle, for example.
Windmills do not work that way!
This is BS. Sure, in high school, the jocks get more respect than the nerds, but it all changes in college. While the jocks are busy stocking shelves at the local grocery store, everyone else who wants a real education and a real job has gone to college, and a good percentage of those are trying to get good grades.
The reason you see so few Americans in science and engineering programs is because it simply doesn't make sense to go into them for most people. For many types of engineering (especially Computer and Electrical), a degree in these fields is a fast track to unemployment, unless you plan to move to Bangalore as soon as you graduate. Even if you do get a job, it's not going to pay very well, and it's not going to last very long. At my megacorp job, there are no engineers over age 35, only managers. Why would anyone want to enter a field like this? You can enjoy your college experience more in some other field of study, and get a much more stable job.
Science isn't any better. Suppose you work your ass off and get some degrees in physics. Where are you going to work with those? Driving a taxicab maybe. If you get a PhD, you could become a professor, which is about the only real use for a degree in science. Of course, then you have to deal with the whole "publish or perish" thing and other problems with academia that have already been detailed in recent Slashdot stories.
The sad reality is that, if you're very technically inclined and have absolutely no desire or aptitude for management (which would be a great recipe for an engineer or scientist), your best bet for a career is to do a couple years of college to get a real education which you didn't get in the horrible US public school system, then go to a trade school and become an auto mechanic, plumber, electrician, or HVAC repairperson. Your pay will be at least as good as an engineer, and you can actually stick with your career for as long as you wish, without worrying about some CEO replacing you with offshored labor. Even better, it's not that hard to start your own small company with your skills (with you as the only employee if you like), and make even more money.