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Dell Expands In India
s31523 writes "NEW DELHI - Computer maker Dell Inc. said Monday it planned to add 5,000 jobs in India over the next two years, bringing its work force in the country to 15,000. Dell is also looking to set up a manufacturing center in India, a move that could help boost the sale of Dell computers here, President and CEO Kevin Rollins told reporters after a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. "
I thought Dell's market share was slipping in the U.S. following their outsourcing of tech support and the frustration/language barrier it created. When are they going to be adding more jobs back in the U.S. to satisfy their customers here?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
It'd be a good idea for them to use local labor to build for local markets. That way you help foster a labor pool that is capable of buying your products. It's part of the reason that Japanese car companies are investing a lot of money into building manufacturing plants in the US, especially in the South.
Dell is also looking to set up a manufacturing center in India
Now that's the first smart thing I've seen anyone do with Indian outsourcing.
Outsourcing manufacturing is a tried and true method of cost saving. Since the work that needs to be done is mostly repetitive, it lends itself well to operating with minimal communication from the headquarters.
Computer Programming, OTOH, is inherently about collecting new requirements and developing new processes. When you have an office with an orthagonal time zone, working with completely separate operations from the one's they are trying to reduce to code, you're significantly reducing your ability to produce the results you need.
Managers need to get this through their heads: Coding is not a blue collar job. It inherently requires direct interaction with other professionals, and is core to making a business work. Bringing highly trained workers from other countries can work (putting aside cultural and language issues that sometimes cause problems), but you just can't be moving your core operations away from your headquarters unless you also move your headquarters. It's a recipe for disaster every time.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
But Rollins said his company's expansion plans were not limited to tapping the talent, but also benefit from the growing demand for desktop computers and notebooks.
A free market economy is not a one way street. You can't treat a country with a population of 1 billion solely as a market to sell goods to. Most people opposed to this idea of "outsourcing" would rather have companies (McDonald's, Coke, or their IT counterparts) profit from selling their goods to other countries, but not have them benefit through creation of local jobs or improvements in economy.
Uh, yeah -- I can't imagine how selling computers to the second-most populous country in the world is in the company's long-term interest. As you say, it's just a scam "so the board members can make an extra buck or two".
Eventually, as they become more developed, India will become one hell of a market. Now, how many people can actually afford a computer - even a Dell? And, you don't need to move to a country to sell there. There's something called the internet that gives anyone an automatic world presence.
Here in Central North Carolina Dell was offered about 300 million dollars in tax rebates to locate a plant here. But the local conservatives and small business groups are up in arms that tax dollars should be spent at all, even if it is for jobs. Now the number of jobs is questionable so the criticism may be valid but on the whole, in the US we prefer the Walmart model which is to move in to a local economy, destroy it, and then hire back some of the people to work in the local hypermart. Most local governments would rather have one Walmart with 1500 part time jobs than one software developer with 300 high paying jobs. So if its going to be 1500 wage slave jobs then there's no need to fork over tax dollars to entice them when there's a bunch of hypermarts lining up to do it for 'free'.
Let Dell hire 100,000 people in India. Americans don't care as long as you don't spend tax money.
I just love not being able to understand the person on the other end of the phone when I need to get a hard drive replaced.
Saturday I was at someone's house and the hard drive was dying. It got a failure code via Dell's built in utility and was going bad. "Steve" was a total PITA and having to try to figure out what the hell he was saying only made things worse. If I had to hear him repeat that dam script one more time I was going to lose it. I then got to fight with his supervisor "Shawn" who finally relented.
This client while a small fish has bought 6 Dells within the past 1.5 years. So far 2 of the POS Maxtor SATA drives Dell uses have failed. Next time a drive starts going South I told my client we won't be calling Dell anymore. We will just go out and buy a drive and skip the whole fight with the person in India bit. It will end up costing much less.
Oh and he probably won't be buying Dell's anymore, not as long as Dell keeps putting calls to India or anywhere else you have to strain to understand the tech on the other end. FU Dell for making people have to deal with this kind of crap.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch