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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.
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"
From experience of remote call centers.
You'll get more sense out of the dog.
Well...they had to catch up intel announcement yesterday that they are investing $1billion in india: http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?conten t_id=83365
...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.
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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?
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/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.
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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.
Microsoft I can see...Not like they're error free to begin with.
But Intel? Didn't they learn anything?
Time to buy some more AMD stock.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
If that headline doesn't send MA a message on switching to OpenDoc nothing will
All the other crap about why MA should switch to OpenDoc I did not agree with. Totally did not (got modded down a bunch for my views also)...this reason, is a great reason why MA should drop office for OpenDoc. No reason to send our money to India...and what better way to penalize a gigantic business then by cutting off their gov't contracts.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Well, the CIA says so:
o rder/2001rank.html
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank
It doesn't surprise me, but I think that table may shock the many Americans who have a very distorted view of the world!
You could use the same blanket statement about the US. I refer you to this little tidbit: Poverty in India. And I quote: "India still has the world's largest number of poor people in a single country. Of its nearly 1 billion inhabitants, an estimated 350-400 million are below the poverty line, 75 per cent of them in the rural areas."
When I was travelling in Mumbai I met some people who had been working as software engineers in San Francisco but returned to India because they said the standard of living was better for a software engineer.Or perhaps because they knew their US jobs would soon be shipped there. And when you live amongst that much poverty, of course your standard of living is better.
GDP is just an economist's smokescreen. They trot those numbers out like somehow that money is making it's way into everyone's pockets, when in fact the poor are still getting poorer, the rich are still getting richer, and the middle class is still footing the bill.
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" 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
Partly true, but then economics is a funny beast. Does the value of the economy of the USA suddenly drop when the dollar drops? Of course not. That is why GDP (PPP) is used rather than straight GDP. Both figures are in some ways misleading, but GDP (PPP) is felt to be the less misleading of the two, which I expect is why it is the figure the CIA world factbook uses it.
No the story should read: "Microsoft outsources to India: Press Paid-off to show in Positive Light".
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF