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Microsoft to Invest $1.7 billion in India
piyushranjan writes "Bill Gates has announced that Microsoft will invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years to expand its operations. The fund would also be spent in making India a major hub of Microsoft's research, product and application development, services and technical support for both global and domestic companies. Microsoft plans to create 3000 more jobs at India, taking it's headcount at India to 7000."
...that they are crapping their pants at the state of linux acceptance in india, and the widespread use of the operating system independant programming language java.
Reuters news story on CNet
s t.util.print/
http://news.com.com/2102-1014_3-5985482.html?tag=
how much money they are making in India now. I suspect this is just a reasonable investment for such a big market.
Why worry about H1B Visas when you can just buy India.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Microsoft Curry XP coming soon.
Does anyone think though that India is having too much change too soon? It's not exactly the most stable part of the world as it is. Fast progress is great - too fast though and you're setting yourself up for serious problems down the road.
If that headline doesn't send MA a message on switching to OpenDoc nothing will.
There's no mention of the thousands of (out-sourced) jobs created by companies who have to support Microsoft Windows on their computers. If India could get that kind of investment to fund open source software, the world would be a much better place. But I guess Bill has to look out for his investors.
From experience of remote call centers.
You'll get more sense out of the dog.
Sure, with recent news of Asian contries to adopt Linux as the Major OS no wonder they invest all this money here, otherwise they will surely loose a emerging market. Now talking about world domination ...
Buy 'Merican.
And A Happy Holiday Season To All My Non-Fundamentalist Supporters.
Regards,
W
...as my right hand takes your wallet.
Cue the debate about US job losses and globalisation. The real issue IMO is the Microsoft tactics of using trade pressure to lobby for anti-competition legislation. "Yes, I'll invest 1.8bn, but only if you ban free software and enable software patents".
The truth is that India is capable of doing a lot better without this kind of "help". I encourage Indian politicians to reject any such pressure. Indian IT can compete securely on the open market, without favours or protectionism. Software patents, and other anti-competitive laws will only hurt India in the medium and long term.
My blog
I expect Microsoft will be making similar investments in China too.
I see this as partly a defensive move - they know India and China are potentially two big markets for the future, and they don't want them considering OSS alternatives. They will use these investments to twist the governments arms. Although I don't think it will work with the Chinese, it might work in India.
Demand will begin to outpace supply in India's IT sector causeing the price of IT skilled labor to increase. If so it will reduce India's competitive advantage and less Indians will see any advantage to coming to the USA.
Meanwhile...
Whisky Tango Foxtrot does that mean? I'm not pedantic about language, but that's just absurd. Perhaps the true impact of this shift will be the reduction of English to verb tense confused propaganda?
Sig under construction since 1998.
The key markets for information technology in the next few decades are not the US, Western Europe or Japan. The key markets key, as in where the majority of goods will be purchsed and consumed-- are Mainlaind China, India, Eastern Europe and South America.
Where do I get that idea? Easy, hardware manufacturers. People in the wealthy nations often have a hard time imagining how hardware can get any cheaper and still remain profitable and yet it does relentlessly continue to decline in price. The answer to how it remains profitable is simple, volume. And that volume cannot and will not exist in the highly profitable and yet relatively sparsely populated wealthy countries. There simply are not enough consumers.
So, as a manufacturer, you simply enter new markets by lowering your costs until the real masses, the billions, can afford your products. And you can bet that WiMax is going to be one of the enabling technolgies that is going to make this push into the "third world" happen all that much faster.
Which means it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to have a real presence in these markets. In fact, you could argue they're moving too slowly.
But none of that has the slightest thing to do with "outsourcing". It's just the reality of where IT is going.
And Microsoft wonders why there are less and less people going into Computer Science and other Computer programs here in the States?
Blue screen of dal.
Let's see, population of approximately 1.1 billion... 7,000 total Microsoft jobs. Yes, I can see where that helps immensely!
India is poor, dirt poor. Even with the fairly decent number of jobs we've shipped there, it doesn't even begin to make a dent in the poverty level. And of course these jobs aren't available to the greater majority of the population, especially to the Dalit (formerly known as "untouchable") segment. Gates may be a big Kahuna in Africa but he isn't going to make much of a difference to India.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Having worked with a software development group in India for 3 years now, I can honestly say I am not impressed. Many of the engineers there are well educated on paper, but in reality lacked creativity and the ability to work independently. They were definitely cheaper, but the price we paid for that was a huge cut in productivity. We needed 2-3x more of them to get the job of one engineer done here.
On the flip side, I also work with many Indians here in the US on my team. The differences are startling compared to their counterparts in India. They are much stronger in all aspects of engineering, whether its creativity or pure coding knowledge. It appears that the issues are somewhat cultural and will improve with time.
Good luck to Microsoft and the others, but we are scaling back our staff in India. It's just not worth it yet.
gasmonso http://religiousfreaks.com/not really, they want to hire 3000 more people, with 1.7billion to invest that works out at 141,666 usd per year, eh........[transmission ended reason="*packing bags and moving to india*"]
India.. America's guinea pig. Is India really going to benefit from the influence of American companies? Why not let India develop on their own, keeping their own heritage and culture and without the influence from American culture? Is this supposed to be Glocalization or Americanization?
FTS: "Microsoft plans to create 3000 more jobs at India" (emphasis mine)
India's pretty big, dude. Some even call it a sub-continent (though the Indian subcontinent also includes Bangladesh and parts of other countries).
I don't think MS is adding 3000 workers at India... in India, perhaps, or at MS's India facilities...
Anyway, It's a good move by MS for India, though Indians will be complaining in a few years about some of those jobs going to Africa and the Pac Rim.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Story should read, "Microsoft bribe country into swallowing their overpriced shitware".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Only in Korea are old dogs in teh refrigerator case.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
Personally I think that this investment is doomed. That is because m$ business strategy simply does not fit with indian people philosophy. They belive in sharing knowledge (and software), those people are philosophically much closer to OSS ideas. That's why piracy is so widespread in asiatic regions - people simply do not agree that something must be paid for more than once, especially knowledge (which they belive is only worth sharing for free). Of course m$ can make there a big outpost, pay people huge amounts of money to get it running. But people will be unhappy and complain about m$'s strategy. And sooner or later it will all collapse.
my bet is that m$ knows all that what I've said. And they siply want to try to kill their philosophy before OSS will grow there strong enough to fully embrace it (and people there - I mean all the folks, not just IT people). This is sad news, as we will be observers of OSS vs. m$ fight on yet another front.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Remember: you can get it fast, right, or cheap. Pick Two.
It would appear the Microsoft Doctrine thinks they can achieve all three.
"Success is a lousy teacher. It makes smart people think they can't lose."
William Henry Gates, 3rd
Apu: "Yes, I'm sorry, I do not speak English, okay."
Woman: "But, you were just talking to..."
Apu: "Yes, yes, hot dog, hot dog, yes, sir, no, sir, maybe, okay."
The bad thing is that it will be an improvement over their current tech support...but I digress.
fak3r.com
Yes, it works out to $141k/yr... assuming they work on the side of the road with 2 sticks they cut themselves.
-Daniel
They should have invested in South Korea instead......
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I actually got the response, "You don't need to know that" once. Sure, it was a relief after waiting almost an hour to get through, to ask a question that SHOULD have been available on the company website (Dell) anyway, and THEN have the individual on the other end tell me that I didn't need to know, but by that point I WANTED to know, and BADLY so I could jsutify the chunk of my life I'd wasted!
I still don't know, by the way. You'd think it'd be easier to figure out what an LED error code meant.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Ya see, whn they come over, somethimes their families open up a restaurant. I just LOVE Indian food and the more Indian restaurants the better!
I'd call him a really bad sailor.... no navigation skillz at all, he's way off course...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
According to reports out, India is expected to grow it's current internet user base from 35 million to 100 million...So...a $1.7 billion investment will go a long way if the Gov't clamps down on piracy and Open Source.
Maybe MS will manage to get them to speak English without an accent that is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
parent? yeah, there's gotta be a parent troll around here somewhere. oh wait.. it's YOU!
its more than TrapZeroHosting.net was willing to offer me! and that was also with sticks working by the side of a road
Link
Microsoft (or any American company) investing overseas is not news. It's foolish to assume that there is such a thing as American protectionism, pride, etc anymore. Whether or not this is a good move will depend on how it effects future software. If we get better Microsoft software that's great they need the help. If not they wasted their money big deal. I'd love to say Microsoft is betraying it's American roots but quite frankly there's nothing left to betray.
Yeah, I'm sure this has nothing to do with India's move to open source software. And I'm sure Microsoft's investment will in no way affect the government's decision. No sir.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Can someone please explain to me why Microsoft feels the need to do this? Okay, application development is something that probably commands a higher salary in the U.S., but customer service?
I have a really big problem with companies that continually fork out technical support overseas. Regardless of location, just about everyone will need to be trained and learn the products that they have to support. Americans are no less capable of this than anywhere else. But keeping tech support in the U.S. has many benefits with respect to customer service that I think outweigh the cost savings.
Obviously, we have language difficulties when outsourcing. The Indian accent can be incredibly thick and very difficult to understand. I'm very adept at deciphering thick accents, but the Indian accent I find to be even more difficult at times than a thick, Scottish brogue. That certainly does not make the customer support experience any more pleasant.
Additionally, technical support nowadays is often nothing more than reading down a checklist of "did you do this?" Yes, I did before I called. "Well, let's try it again." *groan* Fine. "That didn't work either? Then let's try this." Face facts - anyone can do checklists for troubleshooting. Why is that being off-shored?
What's really infuriating about this announcement is that Microsoft is doing this as Louisiana and Mississippi are attempting to rebuild. You hear continual complaints about how companies are not moving back which can make sense from a manufacturing standpoint where large, capital investments of machinery and transportation need to be made; but from a services point-of-view, putting tech support and other business opportunities in Louisiana and Mississippi can still be cost-effective since those areas have incredibly low standards of living relative to the rest of the country. Then of course Microsoft would have the positive PR of (A) helping to rebuild an area that needs to be rebuilt, (B) having people who at least have an easier-to-understand (for the most part) accent on the other end of the line, (C) providing at least some type of jobs to an area that so desperately needs them, particularly now. Yes, I'm sure that hiring workers in LA/MS is still more expensive than India, but there's more to being a stable and respectable company than making the bottom line as large as possible. (I know, I know. Using "respectable" to represent Microsoft left a bad taste in my mouth, too.)
Am I being too idealistic? Well, perhaps. (Hey, at least I admit it.) But it just seems that Microsoft is missing a major opportunity here to do some good right here at home just so save some money that, frankly, it doesn't need to stay afloat. Hell, how large was its profit last year?
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-globalization
not to be rude but they could be doing what any other company with the chance would do... invest where they see growth and not have all the eggs in one basket. Just a thought
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
From the comments, it seems the same low-brow ignorant red-neck racists on ZDNet have now infiltrated Slashdot. How sad. There was a time when discussions on Slashdot were mature and based on facts, not ethnocentric racist diatribe.
Why is the parent a troll, especially when it's true?
Haven't you herd. Anything that de-God's Microsoft is a troll, or overrated, or flame bait. Let's just say that unlike the rest of us, some companies have the money to hire a staff to collect karma points, submit, and post BS pro-M$ propaganda all day long on the more visited blog sites. Slashdot should seriously consider a +1 anti-microsoft mod and a -1 pro-microsoft mod.
Indians tend to be mostly vegetarians.
Good Troll?
Completely Stable?
I think you need to read up on Indian politics, the caste system, their infrastructure, etc;
I'm not bashing India, simply pointing out the obvious, what even the pro-India business community points out...
You need to pull your head out of your ass, and quick, unless of course you've survived, lo all these years, on your own form of methane.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Spot on, do you remember the joint investment in an EU research center at Aachen when they wanted software patents in Europe?
It turned out later that some of the inventions they claimed came from the Aachen center were bought in from outside companies.
Whoever Trolled this down should be awarded the Joseph Goebbels GroupThink certificate.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Seems to me that Microsoft plans to enter the operating system market. Expect every one to use MS Khidkiyan in 2006.
Million Dollar Screenshot
Why send money to other countries? If Microsoft wants to provide something that FOSS cannot then hows about stimulating a(devastated) area with work(read: jobs). Instead they forge on with outsourcing only to continue the devastation to an already devastated economy. Hell, I am in Louisiana(unaffected by hurricane) and in a tech position, and If I loose my job(under 35k/yr) I won't have a choice to stay in IT unless I relocate. The FEMA wages look awesome but they are charging the state for the work. Think Louisiana was the national Black Sheep before? Wait until fema is finished with us.
That said, Fuck Microsoft.
I got an e-mail once stating Bill would give me a dollar...
I never got my dollar.
Looks like everyone in India will get $1.55.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
of india is 3.3 Trillion dollars?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ouch! That sounds painful.
Nerds in the US start whining...
I also saw on 'Front Line', I think it was, on the economic growth of China, that the Chinese banking system is a 'house of cards'. They are over extended and poorly regulated, and if anything starts to go wrong you could see a banking collapse the likes of which the US has not seen since the 30's. It may or may not ripple into the larger global economy but would definitely hurt foreign companies with large investments in China.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
the smart people leave India for the US.
Well, they used to.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From a purely technical standpoint, there is no benefit. Microsoft's project management doesn't scale as it stands, and won't support thousands more programmers on the projects they have. They know this - if you want to make a late project later, add more people. It's true of almost any organization. The communications overheads of large teams overwhelms the added work that can be done.
No, this is a political move, not a technical one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In India, if you are "one in a million," there are a thousand more just like you.
Slashdot ppl will post all sorts of nationalist and fascist crap about India being bought, sold, bad, ignorant and so on.
...
only to be followed by
typical american crowd
The irony and hypocrisy in that is just mind-blowing. I guess that he was too busy showing off his own ignorance and crap about the U.S. to notice, as was the intolerant mod who have his post an "underrated".
if [ "$CRITICISM_TARGET" = "$NON_US_COUNTRY" ]; then
CRITICIZER="evil_and_vile"
else
CRITICIZER="angelic"
fi
Very, very sad.
I would mod this one funny. If I had mod points.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
IMHO, Microsoft would be doing their investors a favor if they got out of the software business, and into the commodities business.
BSOD Bacon
FYI: Commodities are agricultural products. Like coffee, that you had for breakfast. Wheat, which is used to make bread. Pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich.
Hell, how large was its profit last year?
.. you have to show revenue growth and profit increase (compare apple microsoft .. you'll see microsoft share price has not increased much over he last few years, whereas Apple has increase quite a lot since 2002).
Revenue growth, increase in profits is what matters to the investor. If you dont show profit growth and the share prices/value starts to go down as demand for the stock drops.
Reduction in stock price means big losses to investors (why invest in stocks and lose your money when you can keep it in a bank instead?).
In fact, to a short term investor, it doesnt matter if a company is losing money and not even making a profit, as long as the share price is going up.
But for an established company
If you are trusting the facts given by these sites:/ in.html
0 5091201.asp
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4436692.stm
http://www.dqindia.com/content/top_stories/2005/1
http://www.x-rates.com/
From the BBC article, it is about 5344 pounds ($9300 US) annual salary for a software engineer in India. Take that money and you can hire about 182,000 workers in India or give every person in the country $1.50 (or a little less than a pound for 1,080,264,388 people.) Otherwise if you hire 3,000 new workers and pay them that avg. $9300 annual salary, you will still have $1.67 billion left over to invest elsewhere.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
There have been some comments posted here about the Indian culture not fitting in well with the MS philosophy. There have also been some comments about how lacking Indian software engineers are in certain aspects of the engineering process. This may all be true at the moement, however, I work with many in Mumbai and I see this changing. Yes, it is a slow process, but we are slowly teaching them how to be just as ruthless, calculating and competitive as the western business minds are. It's all unfortuante in my view. It will end up destroying their culture and moving us one step closer to global corporte hegemony.
http://www.stockmarketgarden.com/
Microsoft is not the first to do this... everyone is looking to increase their number of jobs in India... but not very many of them mention why they don't have to buy any new desks or chairs to make that possible.
"Happy Christmas and thank you for calling Microsoft Technical Support, Sir. My name is Bob, sir. How may I help you sir?"
" The expanding into Asia and Europe is hardly synonymous with outsourcing."
.
You're right, but the word you are looking for is offshoring, not outsourcing. If the product is being consumed here in the US, but made elsewhere by a company located in the US, that is offshoring. Outsourcing is something totally different, and doesn't apply to this
" The key markets for information technology in the next few decades are not the US, Western Europe or Japan'
You mean, the key emerging markets. IT will still be bigger in the 'western world' + Japan for a while, but it's a lot more developed already, and has less opportunity for an entering player and/or initial sales.
"So, as a manufacturer, you simply enter new markets by lowering your costs until the real masses, the billions, can afford your products."
You mean, you lower your prices. Lowering your costs is not so simple, it doesn't automagically happen as a given over time. But, in essence, you are saying you need to lower your costs so you can lower your prices to be competitive in a poor market while maintaining profitability, right?
"The answer to how it remains profitable is simple, volume."
Again, not so simple. Yes, volume helps, since then fixed costs are diluted with respect to each unit sold. However, your marginal cost of each item sold doesn't change just because you increase your volume -- and labor, raw materials, and energy are not remotely free.
What's really driving the prices of hardware down is a reduction in production cost, based on new manufacturing processes and new designs using cheaper raw materials.
All increasing sales volume does is enable you to remain profitable while pricing your goods at a point closer to your marginal cost of production -- you can pretty much remove the cost of, say, administrative salaries, from your P&L analysis.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
certainly, but there's the possibility that in the coming years they might cut jobs in Europe and the USA and since we're talking about a big firm that would mean alot of people could lose their job.
WTF!? Way to protect the interests of your citizens... NOT!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Clippy: (in a thick Indian accent)
Ok! Yes? I see you are to be making a letter. Yes? I see. You are wanting to make letter. No? Clippy can help you he can. Yes? Ok! I see. Are you to be needing clippy to help you he can? Yes? Yes? Ok?
Then up pops a dialog box with the options: Ok, Yes and I see.
What I find ironic is that Microsoft would never have become the company it is today if Gates had been Indian. They would have been so stifled by the bureacracy, red tape, and corrupt legal system they would have been lucky to simply stay afloat.
Once outsourcing zeroes in on China and Indonesia, India is doomed. The US economy can withstand the outsourcing push, because Americans are culturally a far more entrepreneurial bunch than Indians (of course this will change over time, but not for a long time). Americans find other things to do, short term pain be damned. Indians, on the other hand, will be slow to adapt when IT no longer expands and begins to contract.
I'm sure you speak fluent Hindi, right?
Such investments are hoped to expand the market these companies and others will be able to access, hopefully generating greater revenue by the emergence.
I'm thinking CSCO..
"It may or may not ripple into the larger global economy but would definitely hurt foreign companies with large investments in China."
Or, say, the US Government, which is dependent on Chinese banks to buy our debt and keep the budget deficit afloat.
Or maybe that's how the US will crush China -- renege on our debt to them and collapse their banking system.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
surely that figure includes construction of (a) new building(s), and communications infrastructure. Don't pack your bags just yet :)
...because Plutonians are teh suck
Ok. Well, I didnt graduate from an Indian university. I just had the joy of watching Indian graduate students dumpster dive for my code at an American university. My take on this? Quality doesnt matter, coorporations have a strangle hold over America, and they go with whats cheep and make things work, patch as you go. Yes, university enrollment in CS and all tech fields is falling and will continue to fall until the US is completely incompotent and we become nothing more than a huge wellfare state. Eventually the rules in this country will be re-written, borders will be closed, but only after a sufficient social collapse. But Im not worried. I see all these people around in $300,000 homes and two brand new cars, living on nothing but credit, it wont be long. Meanwhile, I delay inevitably defaulting on my student loans because, though I was one of the best programmers in my class, I cannot get a good job in industry.
If you want your child to have a job:
1) turn off your television.
2) stop buying new computers and software.
3) refuse to work on computers whenever possible.
4) stop buying video games and electronics.
5) boycott large ISPs, go with a small american ISP like turbousa.
A three word troll...and it got an insightful mod! Well done, my friend!
The whole outsourcing to cheaper labor thing gives people like me, freelance web wevelopers, less work. I have had several clients tell me they are outsourcing to India. India's got plenty of people and their own government. I'm sure they can figure out their own infrastructure. And screw you Microsoft for hiring the local Mexican standing in front of Home Depot.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Yipeee! That's good news for budding engineers like me... Maybe now it will come to my college for campus recruitment....
Chaitanya a.k.a PaRAdoX
Right, I'm sure their software development experience would help them run an efficient and profitable commodities business. NOT! Getting into gold, which is currently at a 23 year high (I believe) would be about as smart as my local bread manufacturing company starting up a dot com at the height of the internet bubble. I do agree with you about the large US deficit though.
Yeah, I know...He's the 'i' in one of the endzones in Giants Stadium.
s ia/07highway.html states in one section "Workers earn about $2,400 a year - nearly five times the average per capita income - and sometimes more." Sounds like we can export one more thing India...Trade Unions!
But seriously, the NY Time article, "All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India," http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/a
Ahhh, nothing like a call to strike, goons busting on picket lines, scabs getting shot to get the blood pumping!
If Microsoft is trying to influence legislation in India, thus making the market more favorable to itself, how is that a "free market"?
They only have to pay indian workers 1/5 that the rest of the devoloping world has to pay for computer science people. Senior developers only getting 10 - 14 dollars an hour. 3000 developers cost the same as 400 or 500 workers would cost in Europe or U.S; I don't understand how this is a good thing for india. They are still being underpaid by the rest of the world standards.
$ 1.54 per person, which is about what, a week's worth of wages ?
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
How can you send billions of dollars overseas? How can you do this to us, when we totally bailed you out a few years back? We sold out US consumers so that your money-printing business model could continue to flourish and feed back into our economy. Now you're sending billions overseas? WMD!! WMD on your ass! Threatenin' the homeland! Terrrizing the economy! Condi, go get my bike!
include $sig;
1;
More companies going to India?
Well, I guess I am going down to McDonalds to pick up some applications -- anybody want me to pick them one up as well?
http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/business/showA
For example, Intel is designing Xeon2 completely in Bangalore, India! That is an entire product line moved to India. This is very similar to Intel's strategy of moving most mobile chip work to Israel (well, they won the internal product war).
This is a well established phenomenon now. Why hire Indians in the US, when you can hire the same folks in India for 1/4th the price. For Indians, why work in the US, when you can work in your homeland and live a very comfortable life (perhaps more so because money goes a longer way in India in terms of domestic help, etc).
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=suSG
They have no choice but to hurt America by outsourcing thousands of workers, if they want to compete with companies like Apple, right?
I mean, Microsoft's profit margins are SO thin already.
From Wikipedia:
"The economy of India is the fourth-largest in the world as measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), with a GDP of US $3.36 trillion. When measured in USD exchange-rate terms, it is the tenth largest in the world, with a GDP of US $691.87 billion (2004)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India
The $3.3 trillion figure sounded wrong to me, as that would put the per capita income here around $3000 -- I've been in India for the past 6 months, and it certainly seems lower than that. So the real figure is around $600 US per capita.
Believe me, the influx of money from the technology industry has had a major effect in India. New building are going up in droves, land prices are skyrocketing, people are moving from villages into the cities. $1.7 billion is no drop in the bucket here.
One problem with outsourcing to Mississippi or Louisiana is that people CAN't read helpdesk checklists. Here is an example of Toyota picking Canadian workers because training illiterate workers was so difficult for other companies in the south. (http://www.decaturdaily.com/decaturdaily/news/050 708/toyota.shtml)
t ml)
India has a large pool of WELL EDUCATED cheap labor. I am from Mississippi. I have friends down there who can't read. My brother works in a car factory in MS and the employee training was done using pictograms because there are so many illiterate workers in the class.
Even before the hurricane Mississippi and Louisiana were education backwaters. One in 3 residents can not read or write. (http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/oct1998/ill-o14.sh
And the sad thing is since so many people "never needed no education" they don't see a reason to "get their kids learnt up neither". So the viscous cycle continues with each generation poorer and with less hope than the last.
Nations that consider education important will always prosper over nations that chose to stagnate. The US has long stigmatized intelligence and this leads to ignorant workers. Until it is sexy to know something we will continue to crank out barely educated frat boys and few scientists and engineers.
How well would you be living in LA if you made 3000$? You must remember, when you adjust GDP/capita for PPP you get the average income of the person as if he were living in the US (if you are using the US as unit PPP).
The US economy can withstand the outsourcing push, because Americans are culturally a far more entrepreneurial bunch than Indians (of course this will change over time, but not for a long time).
Dude, the U.S. economic system is in debt up to it's hairline (way above the eyeballs). The government deficit is huge. Most people have mortgages, credit card bills, etc. What happens when interest rates shoot up a couple points? Families won't be able to pay their Adjustable Mortgage or credit card bills, and paying for georgy-boy's silly little war and all that washington pork will be much more expensive.
Have I said anything about the trade deficit with China? Now China makes most of the stuff that we used to make for ourselves, and loans us the money to buy it from them.
No, the US economy is fubar'd, probably next year. The housing bubble will go *pop*, or something else will set it off, but we're all screwed economically eventually some day soon. ("we" being all of the humans on planet earth who participate in some form/fashion in the so-called "global economy", excepting those who are reasonably self-sufficient and power-mongerers who've taken residence in the halls of governments).
Silver, food, guns, gold are on my shopping list this christmas...
And don't forget the 2 billion stolen by the politicians and other fat cats. The workers will be making minimum wage despite the immense amount of money.
That's exactly the point: $1.7 billion dollars goes a lot further in India than in the US.
Moreover, Microsoft is spending $1.7 billion actual US dollars -- not $1.7 billion dollars at Indian purchasing power parity. If you want to compare the purchasing power parity numbers, you should first change the $1.7 billion actual dollars into PPP dollars. Then it's about $8.5 billion as measured by PPP.
I saw Microsoft's facility under construction in Hyderabad about two months ago. It was surrounded by tent cities of construction workers, mostly comprised of construction debris holding up blue tarps absconded from the site. Not to rap Microsoft, it's just the way the construction economy works on any project. Also, the workers are happy for the opportunity just to have a wage. Yet what a contrast to see a modern building as if growing out of a sea of tarps and destitution.
In a land of have-nots, the have-nots don't blame the haves, instead they try to emulate. That was the biggest culture shock for me. I wasn't looked down upon because I have, instead I was admired for success. Success is a role model in India, not a point of contention.
Regarding the good engineers vs. the mediocre ones, the sharp engineers will gravitate toward projects that offer the potential of rotation to the United States. They'll live on Ramam noodles and pocket their perdiem while here, then return home and break the cycle, able to invest in a home perhaps. As for the poor engineers, they won't land such possibilites, and tend to be the ones found when working strictly locally on outsourced projects. If Microsoft rotates workers, they'll get the sharp people. If there is no possilibity of temporary overseas assignments, they'll get the bottom pickings. Simple as that.
Microsoft is just investing there because trade laws artificially favor India over the US.
3 2.stm
. stm
The laws were changed around September 11th 2001 so that the US can sell WMD to India.
Look at the following:
July 2001:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/14555
September 2001:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1558860
Feburary 2005:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4250223.stm
It's worth noting that Microsoft LOST 4 billion something on the X-Box. So, in short, Microsoft thinks having a gaming console in the US (and Japan/Europe/Etcetera to a lesser extent) is more important than the entire 1 billion+ population of India.
They're not good for software, and they're not good for America.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Just like IBM, Cisco, and Oracle, they finally figured out how to handle this by putting the whole team over there, hence the large investment to create "centers" in India. I know a lot of senior folks from the states moving to India to run a team of developers and they travel periodically back to the US to talk with corporate and the customers. With the cost of living being 100x less, it's could be a win-win for some folks (e.g. if you can speak the language and tolerate the culture).
It's a better model 2nd time around on outsourcing, though commoditizing the s/w development industry still has a 50/50 chance of stifling innovation permanently.
1.7 billion over 4 years for 3000 people = $141666 per person.
Don't forget that offshore development implies there is a manager in the US. The success depends heavily on the manager, too. You can't reject the idea of offshoring only because it failed in one case.
The question shouldn't be "if offshore engineering works or not". There won't be a general answer because it will always depend on the type of products you make, people you work with, etc. Of course it will work, in some cases.
The question should be "if offshore works in our case", and "how we can make offshore succeed". There are many things you can do. Frequent communication, commitment from both sides to help each other instead of blaming each other, etc.
billy g, "hi, india. i'm your friend. how would you like a $1.7 billion baggy of ms' EEE crack? it feels soooooo good."
india "sure, i'll take the baggy and a hit, why not?"
then the downward spiral ensues...
Here, you know, in the USA...
Where jobs are getting fewer, wages are getting smaller, and proverty is rising.
But, no - over in India, where labor is cheap, the cost of living is dirt on the dollar, and no one buys your products (since they just pirate everything) - that's the better place to get employees...
When no one is left to buy your products - then what....
R&D to India ? Good Joke! If he has the balls let him reply what kind of R&D is being done in India ? Give me the Business Unit and the Products. Ask him how many Doctorates and well known Researchers are on his payroll in India. Its a different story that Indians run away from Microsoft and thus has a large pool of Open Source Developers.
What about frozen concentrated orange juice?
by shitbag u were still refering to the indians, right?
lol, they're all brown like they're covered in shit.
I had the pleasure to talk to support this other week. I needed the lpd name of a Xerox Document Centre 440. I know for a fact that almost all printers who are net enabled do have a lpr que name, its just not printed on todays sorry excuses for manuals. This copier/printer do have a lpr que name.
I spoke to four different people on tech support who at first thought i was talking about something in MS Windows. I tried in vain to explain what i needed to know, why, that their machine did really have an lpr que and no, it was not a Windows application. I further explained that i needed the name to be able to connect the printer to an Novell Open Enterprise. The fast answer was ofcourse "-we dont support open enterprise". Well i didnt want support on OES, all i wanted was the name of the friggin lpr que. Fourth call i called it a day and swore to never ever have anything to do with a Xerox machine of any kind ever again. Looked around a bit and found the lpr que name of every net enabled printer in history on Novells own site. How is it possible that a tech support dont know that lpr even exist? This wasnt just a consumer support, it was the support for big customers.
Support like that are cheap but really worthless for the consumer.
HTTP/1.1 400
Now, they should sponsor the Indian Cricket Team.
Mine was about the same. Had this error with a laptop...Sometimes when you plugged it in, the power LED would start flashing Yellow - Yellow - Green.
All I wanted to know was, what the hell does that mean? Ungrounded outlet? Charger fault? Failing power supply? Battery Error? A production engineer, or a maintenance technician could have told me in a second. A helpful chart could have done the same. I waited 45 minutes on the phone to talk to a person who had no clue, and passed me to a second person, who passed me to a third person, who talked to her manager, and came back with "It's not important, you don't need to know."
WHAT? I demanded to speak to someone who was knowledgable, and I got the dial tone. Apparently the dial tone is the most knowledgable person they've got.
I was pissed at Dell before that, and that was the last damn straw. I dumped my webhost because they used damn Dell computers. As far as I'm concerned buying a Dell is the same as paying someone to screw you over and laugh.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Actually, $1.7b is 0.26% of $650b, unless you're making a different comparison than what I think you're making.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Companies always get hurt when they outsource to india. American consumers refuse to do business with them. Not to mention 1 American worker is as productive as 3 Indian workers. Indians work for less, but cost:productivity is still greater to get the work done over there.
Telemarketing companies specifically learned how inneffective Indians are. Everyone I know hangs up on an outbound Indian call immediately. And If I call a customer service line that rings in India, I hang up and take the product back rather than working to get it fixed.
It just strengthenes the arguments against MS. Tell people that they will be forced to run Indian software, and can only get help from some person in India. They will become more open to other possibilities.
So, what's the Indian equivalent to the H-1B?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
their software will always suck!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Do this many people on Slashdot.org not realize the crop of talented IT engineers available in India? Microsoft is not being humanitarian or cheap when they open offices in India. They are looking to capitalize on a vast workforce well-trained in IT, anxious to work, relatively well-versed in english (vs a china or eastern europe or s america) and willing to do at an acceptable price. Yes it will drive american wages down, but compared to the global marketplace american wages are a tad high. And yes the cost of living in the US is higher than india, so that is part of the reason. The same forces that will drive US wages down, such as cheap labor in India - will drive the cost of goods in this country down as well (see wal mart). Read a book by a guy whose initials are TLF and then come back and post.
Go gerk off to your sister's picture, while Indian and Chinese programmers fix the shit you wrote.
Damn, this is almost as bad as $80K overpaid ignorant blue-collar red necks in Oklahoma complaining about why Ford can't afford to pay them 10 times the going wages while competing with better madeJapanese, Korean, and soon even Chinese cars.
Oh, and by the way, 10 years of slobbering your fat fingers over Linux hasn't been able to turn up anything close to my exquisite OSX interface, which Apple apparently was able to slap together in just a few years. Hats off to all those Indian, Chinese and Eastern European programmers in the Valley.
The numbers are viewed with the same distortion.
Bearing in mind that GDP is a measure of how fast money flows within a system, and frequently counts the same money more than once.
example: you spend a dollar at the store, the store spends that dollar to buy goods, the manufacturer uses that dollar to create goods and pay the employee to make the goods, who then spends that dollar at the store. that counts as $4 towards the GDP.
Bill Bryson made the observation that the biggest contributor to the GDP is a "terminal cancer patient going through a costly divorce." (Amazon seearch inside the book tells me it's on page 54 of "I'm a Stranger Here Myself." He is quoting from Atlantic Monthly...) and a page earlier points out that by some estimations, the O.J. Simpson trial alone may have added $200M to the GDP that year.
GDP is simply a speedometer on the cyclical flow of money, not a measure of wealth.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
When I lived in San Francisco a few years ago, the poverty level was figured to be about $45,000 a year.
When I lived in rural Vermont for a bit, the level was closer to $20,000. god knows the rents were cheaper, and surprisingly, so was the gas.
For the same salary, I could go from a poverty statistic to upper middle class.
So which poverty level were they using?
[another interesting tidbit is the number of people who made a bunch of money in the SF bubble period, and then moved to Oregon to spend it because it would go further.]
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Interesting. So what you are saying is the we should be investing more in our schools right here at home. I think that will be hard to do to given all the rhetoric against "liberal intellectual elite" and such. When people who actually bother to get educated get called communists and terrorists and when the president of the country deliberately speaks at a fifth grade level to distance himself from the education he supposedly received at yale you can't expect much investment in education can you?
evil is as evil does
I missed the four years part.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Microsoft trying to compete with China which is a Linux country.
Sorry, the Chinese will beat the Hindus every time. And the Chinese will end up selling to the Japanese, the Koreans (who already hate you, Bill), the Thais, the Indonesians, the you-name-it-Asians.
You lose, Bill.
Have a nice day.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Hasn't the free market in legislation worked pretty well here in the United States? These days you can get pretty favorable legislation for not too much money, single party control notwithstanding.
Isn't it unfair to deny India the full power of the dark side of the free market? The whole Bhopal disaster shows that the Indian government is fully up to the task of accommodating paying customers.
[Sorry, I'm just too cynical these days.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Bill Gates recently went touring a bunch of colleges near me talking about how we need to create more tech. jobs. Somehow, I doubt that the job shortage he was talking about is "forcing" him to outsource, so I have a feeling that he's just trying to play both sides.
Way to go, Bill!
The economic fundamentals are far worse today than in the 80's when gold went to $850/oz. - which is $2000-$4000/oz today adjusted for inflation.
If gold gets and stays over $530, then it starts to act as a competitive option to the dollar as a defacto international trade currency. That would cause the remonitization of gold which would cause a massive decline in the dollar, a nuclear explosion in the gold market, and a super-nova in the silver market.
There are fundamental reasons why gold went from 420 only a few months ago to 510 as of the other day. The risks of the dollar going the way of confederate money have been suverely understated. This is not the time to be betting against precious metals.
How many of these jobs that will be created in India will be lost in America?
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
It is sad but true that slashdot has become a forum for racial diatribe against Indians by xenophobes.
I can appreciate nationalism. Nationalism is when you ask that why these companies are sending jobs to India and they should keep it in states for American interests.
Xenophobia is: Indian programmers are bad/incompetent, India is dirt poor, India is all about caste/cow how can our traditions and software survive there. I have worked on maintaining software code written by natives from India, Europe and USA. There were good pieces and horrible pieces of code written by programmers from all the three places. There were good programmers and bad programmers and not bad Indian programmer and good American programmer.
English is one of the main reasosn why India has become a major software hub. Howver we never wanted to learn english. English was imposed upon us by racist and brutal colonial rule as a medium to segregate people and protect their exploiting empire. It is all karma !!
Anyway for the rednecks out there CISCO has Intel have also announced $1 billion investment program in India. And if my memory serves me right AMD has similar plans too. And so has almost all the other major companies.
You mean MS declares financial war on yet another 3rd world country.....
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
My dog is a vegetable, you insensitive clod!
And live there for a couple of years.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Fucking great.
Clue #2, there's more where that came from and they are cheaper where they are. It's easier to find bright people when you have a billion to chose from.
Currently, those you see here are more "motivated". When you have a chance to leave a $3 trillion economy for a $12 trillion economy with one quarter the population, or 16 times the wealth. People in India still starve to death, while "poor" people in the US are fat.
All this gets around the fundamental problem, the use of slave labor. Microsoft, like GE and other big dumb companies think they can use IP laws to keep control of the world without real intellectual effort. It's a suicidal betrayal to put research facilities offshore. Those that do are those that know. In time, they will develop better weapons systems than we have and the "slaves" will break free. What kind of neighbors they will be is largely dependent on how we treat them now. As big dumb companies have used such labor moves to threaten their own employees, the treatment of others is bound to be poor.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
They are an evil company. First, they create software that is so full of bugs, it can barely accomplish anything without causing the user tremendous headache, frustration, anger, depression, sexual problems, and other maladies. Then, they go to all the good software companies and steal all their good employees, so as to destroy those companies and their products. Then they buy perfectly good products and destroy them. Now, instead of helping the United States, especially at this critical time in our history when the country needs all the help it can get from the businesses that profit so enormously from the freedoms made possible here, they are going to India to help erode our economy and increase the trade deficit. This, at a time when they should, instead, concentrate their efforts on helping our great president to win the war on terror and have a victory in Iraq. What an evil company.
We see all these cries and tears over MS or any other transnational company doing what is good for their business, because it may take away jobs from the west.
/. readers are equally infuriated when subsidies given to 20,000 super rich cotton farmers in the US (with ranches of 1000 hectares or more), take the jobs away from millions of poor farmers in Asia and Africa, and starve them to death.
/.
I will be interested in learning how many of
What is the bigger evil for humanity?
a jobless american programmer, still driving his SUV, and reading
OR
a jobless african farmer, starving to death, as you read this?
No point in crying guys - Some days you will be the pigeon, some days you will be the statue.