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Why Apple Backed out from India?
rmunaval writes "BusinessWeek reports an interesting article on why Apple might have backed out from India. The prime reason being, India has grown at a much more rapid rate than expected and is no longer the cheap destination for the companies. It grew at an astonishing rate of 9.3% last quarter."
We have to pay them close to a living wage?
That wasn't part of the deal.
Forget it, we're out of here. . .
Funny, back when there was so much lather over outsourcing everything but the CEO to India, a few folk mentioned that this might happen and were replied to that with 2 billion people it won't happen in our lifetimes. Hope you are all doing ok!
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Now India will feel the pain as jobs are outsourced to Asia and Eastern Europe where rates are cheaper! Pretty soon, people in Zimbabwe will be coding :)
http://psychicfreaks.com/I am standing beside myself with amazement. Such growth brings a tear to my leg.
The most likely reason that comes into my mind is a power struggle of some sort between management of that company. I bet someone was sold on an idea that moving jobs to India would cut costs, but then someone else was in the opposite camp and we just saw the result of that battle. Was any manager fired from the company within the past month?
You can't handle the truth.
Apple is a publicly traded company and as such here's what's important to them.....
Making money for their stockholders.
That means sweatshops for iPods and doing things like heading down the dangerous path of closing off the Darwin source for development so that OSS geeks can't find a way to make OS X work on commodity boxes.
Apple is going to do what is best in their corporate interest. Surprised? Don't be. It's business
I thought the hippies were all about india, them being "like all about peace and love and like totally in touch with the universe man".
I mean, Ravi Shankar taught the Beatles to be smelly no-good useless non-contributing waste byproducts of society.
Am I the only one who sees this as utterly fascinating?
In a way US corporation going to India stimulated this growth. It is interesting to me that India has changed because of outside investment but the way they have changed has made them less appealing to those same investors.
Globalization is bitch, isn't it?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Is it only me that gets frustrated when my calls are piped over to India? I'm all for globalisation and outsourcing but when basic customer service suffers it serves only to frustrate customers, or me at least.
I've lost count of the number of times I've literal just given up and hung up while trying to do simple tasks over the phone like notify change of address or query a bill.
The 3 companies I've had particular problems with are Amex, Dell and Apple.
Well looks like work is finally going to be coming back to the UK
I never understood moving stuff like phone centres and manufacturing away from the customer-base.
Sure the labour might be cheaper and all (offsetting transportation of the goods ) but you end up taking out of your control aspects that keeping it in-house provided.
After the batch of Indian call-centre workers stealing UK account details and selling them I am glad such centres are comming back home
What a retarded non-sequitor post. It's not even Apple making the excuses, as they haven't offered any and didn't write this article.
"The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong."
My company is currently using Indian developers to augment our in-house staff. Every time the offshore company presents someone to us that cuts the mustard, we end up having to rotate someone else on after that person bolts for another company in India three months later. We keep getting told that demand is so high for QUALITY Indian developers that no one can keep them. They keep bouncing from outfit to outfit, getting salary bumps with each move. It's second hand information obviously, but it certainly does synch with what we've experienced.
"They just don't have any style." -Steeve Jobs
No sig for now.
Not Apple Records, silly!
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
I think Apple's just grabbing straws at excuses.
err, straws and excuses for what? Your analogy about waistlines made no sense at all and then you finish with that little gem.
Not sure how the subscription model for time.com works, but I have been able to access all stories in the Cover article without a subscription:
Bombay's boom
Hooray for Bollywood
India Awakens
My lost world
Worth a read.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
India is becoming expensive in some parts like Bangalore. But Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi, Trivendrum are not that expensive.
I still feel, it is not a good decision, looking at huge market (over 1 billion people) of India.
hilarious
Doesn't the part of knowing when to cut and run imply that it was the right decision? The way I've always looked at outsourcing as an engineer is that you want to have people of varying backgrounds in any large organization. I think that India and China are part of this along with the US and others. Other countries will come into the fold as well, but I think that it'll be for the better of the company to have multiple groups with different backgrounds and experiences.
Now, it sounded like this venture was purely for help desk, which I think is being performed at a commodity level nowadays (in the sense that all service seems to suck, given that good service costs money). In that case, moving to wherever it is cheapest is probably a good move. Though maybe they'll just add to the number of workers woring 15-hour days in China.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
Homer taught all the Indians about paid vacations and golden parachutes and casual fridays and health plans, just a couple of weeks ago.
Actually, that episode was good social commentary... It's basically what's happening. The Indian labour force is developing the sense of entitlement so near and dear to our hearts.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I gotta wonder if the person who submitted this article worked as a translator for Zero Wing...
"All your base are belong to us."
"India has grown at a much rapid rate."
Yeah, seems like the same guy...
What we are at this point seeing are the first steps in a cycle of balance.
India has been in a horrible financial condition. It's got large amounts of debt and it's trying to work it's way out of them. This comes with financial assistance from the international community. You have many of these poorer nations not able to afford the subsidies anymore for farmers , which means more people migrating to the cities for the promises of these fantastic tech jobs.
Problem is the cities aren't ready to handle all these people, and the government isn't ready to handle all this displaced workforce. Result? SLUM TOWN!
Uh Oh, now the international community is on nations to provide a base level of support for their people. They don't want sweat shops and shanty towns of workers paid pennies on the dollar of what others get. India has to rely for a good deal on it's own people to solve this problem for themselves because they don't have the money to. If they want to they have to start taxing these companies more, which means.... costs go up. On an individual level? How to get out of the slum, you have to get paid more so you can afford to live there, you demand more pay.. they demand more for your contracting.. Costs rise...
Suddenly all those cost benefits from outsourcing start evaporating.
From my personal perspective.. yay. This is far more effective a way to "keep jobs here" than trying to legislate some mandate for companies to do so. In this case, the "free market economy" is actually doing it's job.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
We want cheapness! Even at being cheap.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This economic phenomenon is expected and was already discussed in this fora.
As the demand for the work increases, to get the best in the business, one has to pay more.
Also, the overall economic indicator increases along with it comes higher land rates + higher standard of living.
This makes it much more costly for the average person too, which means the average pay increases quite a bit.
Along with it comes the fast growth of the other economic indicators - more people get more vehicles etc.
These things will start congesting the infrastructure, which also would act as a deterrent for new companies.
Now the option is to go to not so fancied (earlier) sites in India (or any outsourcing nation), so that you get everything cheap.
Since they saw the growth of fancied sites, they also would have improved the basic infrastrcuture to make it close to them.. without the current issues. But I guess Apple execs were lazy enough to not look at the new sites and stayed with the fancied ones. -- Yep, they had to pay for that.
I guess China skipped these issues by using far-sighted (and possibly evil) government policies - ex - they forcibly decreased the standard of living in many areas - which meant you get more people coming to urban centers - which means the demand and supply chain stays the same.
Also they improved the infrastructure by pouring in money for the same + they started builiding up a lot of suburbs to decrease the rising land-rates.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
What's a "reason being"?
"India has grown at a much rapid rate"? As opposed to "much slow rate"?
It grew 9.3%? As in, the land area expanded?
India is going through a tech boom similar to the U.S. tech boom in the 90's. Qualified computer-related experts are demanding higher and higher salaries and jumping to whatever company is the current high bidder. As the wages go up, the rest of India's economy booms. India is beginning to take on many of the good and bad aspects of the U.S. economy. With most of its over 1 billion people in povberty, China can out compete India easily on wages. Training just 1% of that number with technial support produces a 10,000,000 strong workforce. The process of U.S. jobs migrating to India will happen to Indian jobs over the next 5-10 years as China becomes the outsourcing destination of choice.
With IBM CEO announcing $6 Billion for expansion in India, which also included setting up worldclass IBM Research centers, I think it was a bad move by Apple. IBM CEO & executives are much more experienced and powerful in the corporate world than Apple executives are. When Bach's player hits the road, Jobs will be forced to move Cupertino to Bangalore or he will move to Benaras ;-)
Not Apple Records, silly!
But I thought the Beatles were profiting from everything I bought from iTunes. Are you trying to tell me they weren't? Somebody should sue iTunes's ass over this!
This guy's the limit!
Didn't Dell (or maybe Gateway?) pulled out of India a while back? If memory serves, there were a lot of consumer complaints about the customer service. I belive the main problem was a language barrier.
Perhaps Apple felt they would hit the same problem and reconsidered? I guess maybe they're learning from another company's mistake... If this is the case, it's nice to see some corporate / organizational intelligence, even if that particular phrase is an oxymoron.
They keep bouncing from outfit to outfit, getting salary bumps with each move.
You can blame HR for this. HR needs to weed out people who have made these kinds of moves too much in favour of people with long term business relationships with their employers. Testing a person's loyalty is HUGE for HR and they do typically drop the ball on it more than they keep the ball in play.
But blame the economy too. Companies have treated employees so poorly in the past, on almost every level, that there has to be some accountability for that. Every action triggers and equal and opposite reaction.
Treat them nicely and they treat YOU nicely. Treat them poorly for long enough and they will treat every other company categorically as poorly as they have been treated. This permanence of occupational conditioning is dark and moody at the core. It embellishes and derives its source from a much larger problem of economic scale.
People don't care enough about their fellow person, anymore. But the change has to start small and spread without being extinguished, like Pay it Forward.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Or maybe they did not feel like competing for the scarce, good programmers with IBM and a few hundred other companies. Really, there are better, cheaper places for outsourcing and outsourcing itself has significant drawbacks. As for the relative competence of IBM and Apple executives, I think you may wish to review the track records in the last 5 years.
First the number formatting and now this:
Why Apple Backed out from India? [redundant question mark]
rmunaval writes "BusinessWeek reports [reports??] an interesting article on why Apple might have backed out from India. The prime reason being, [redundant comma] India has grown at a much rapid rate than expected and is no longer the [better - 'a'] cheap destination for the [redundant] companies. It grew at an astonishing rate of 9.3% last quarter."
Incidentally the anyone with the slightest degree of familiarity with Indian English will recognize the syntax, which means the submission is from a particularly clueless Indian or a troll seeking to rouse Slashdot's never-starved Grammar Nazis.
Isnt it true that they had just setup a shop a few months back? So, back then they must have had some reasons to do it in the first place?
I cannot believe the salaries just increased so much in such a short period... whatever were the reasons for the initial move couldnt have changed so quickly..
This looks like one of those typical "management now (suddenly) believes" kinda screwup.. either they accidently looked at 1906 salary figures and costs instead of 2006, or maybe someone was suddenly replaced?
Of course, the management would not admit the screw-up, so it is justified on some ground or the other.
I think you are in the minority. I love calling and chatting with akmed or apu about how to reboot my computer and then spend the next 20 minutes giving an english lesson.
It's great fun and makes my day to the point that when we switched to DELL platinum support I ask to be transferred to regular PC support desks when I call in.
I love the refreshing education on how people in india pronounce several common terms in a way that we can not understand let alone repeat.
"I am too happy to help you, please wait while I get on my desk."
you cant buy that kind of culture!
/dev/random
Even if my company treats me like a god, I'm going to leave for a 25% pay increase.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So you're suggesting Apple should move back to Springfield!
Even if my company treats me like a god, I'm going to leave for a 25% pay increase. /. acct!!
Just remember never to let them read your
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
.... what will be the party line from the truly Apple Devout?
1) Indian tech support is far beneath Apple's *amazing* tech standards?
2) The Mercedes/Pinto comparison again
3) ????
4) Profit!
do() || do_not();
The article makes is sound like it was Steve himself that pulled the trigger. While he may be the noteworthly public face this sounds more like a high level manangement or accounting decision on not something that would have needed Jobs personal attention. When you get to that level you higher good people, pay them well, and then expect them to do their job and make you more money. Just My .02
Personally, I love getting transferred to the US. (I'm Canadian). I get to hear all about the evils of a "rooter", "wahless" connections, and the ever popular "lah bub" (light bulb). I also have the absolute joy of hearing temperatures given to me in fahrenheit, and clueless techs who have no idea what celcius is. I also have had the absolute joy of being asked for an American credit card, as it was inconcievable that there was a world outside of the US of A (mind you, this last item was in person, and I was also asked for California ID, rather on the phone, but the point remains). And of course, the USA's finest... *drumroll* being told that component cables would not increase the quality of picture on my PSX games (by a Sony rep).
Yeah, I love getting bounced to the US.
This should have been obvious to everybody, but what happens of course is that as companies hire their workers in what are essentally third world countries and pour money into the local economy in the form of foreign capital, the local economy picks up and suddenly the price of labor in the market increases. This makes the whole outsourcing thing a bit of a rat race as everytime you find some suitable location with cheap labor and build your factory/office there, the cost of labor begins to rise until it's hardly worth the trouble of outsoucing in the first place. Then you have to look for a new place with a new supply of cheap labor to start the process all over again.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to move into countries with brutal kleptocracies that will insure that the wages you pay never stimulate the local economy too much and the strong armed government thugs keep the people from setting up any sort of fair or equitable government. Your best bet is for those countries where two ethnic minorities have been fighting for centuries over some long lost or stupid reason. The downside is that it's very hard to find suitable working conditions in those type of countries because you generally have a big security problem and basic services like power and phone can be hard to come by (and unreliable). Also, you'll have to bribe government officials like crazy to avoid having your business raided, however in the long run it'll be cheaper than paying a decent wage to the workers. If you're really commited, you can surreptitiously fund one side of the conflict and give them enough of an upper hand to overthrow whatever government the country currently has and set up your own puppet government in its place. The only problem with this is that the puppets often try to sever ties with you once they get what they want (cheap slave labor and a country to call their own).
I read the internet for the articles.
First, the BW article speculates... the author doesn't really know. So was it high wages? Was it something else? "We" don't know yet.
However, there are several issues with setting up in India that probably make it less attractive for Apple.
1) Worker loyalty: while all tech workers probably seem like mercenaries these days, it is even more so in India's white hot tech areas. The workers will leave for what we, in the U.S., would consider miniscule salary differences.
2) Worker training: Indian workers are often broad brush trained in "popular" technologies - finding software engineers trained in non-Windows, non-Oracle, non-SAP, or non-J2EE tech is probably much harder to find at a cost effective salary. Again, this is an issue in the U.S. too, but more pronounced in India and many other non-U.S. technology boom areas.
3) Best of the best: Apple is small (workforce numbers) and tends to follow the hire the best of the best (even if they don't give them the best of the best resources to work with). Those that are really good are probably already working in the U.S., or would not find it all that hard to make it into the U.S. The number left of the best of the best in India probably aren't much cheaper these days (one would often have to be 4:1 to 8:1 cheaper to outweigh the below).
4) Big costs (not just money): Apple doesn't have huge projects that require a thousand or thousands of engineers on a single project that might be able to amortize the costs/issues of temporal and geographical displacement. Apple has most of its software engineering done in Cupertino, and it would take a big shift to deal with significant outsourcing or remote development.
5) Core strength: software engineering is Apple's bread and butter, it is what differentiates the hardware, it is its own profit center. Messing with this too much is not a good idea. Apple can't treat this as a commodity item on a balance sheet.
6) Expansion deals went through in CA: Apple bought a large data center and has plans to build another campus in CA - and the review of those deals going through probably meant that this Indian effort doesn't make sense for Apple right now.
None of this particularly means anything with respect to India, India's tech boom, IBM in India, outsourcing to India, etc. This is merely Apple's evaluation on whether or not it makes sense for Apple. These issues have been there, will continue to be there. It is strange that Apple started and effort but then pulled out, but that is better that they are contantly critically re-evaluating rather than what we've seen from some other U.S. companies that have staked huge efforts on "hot trends" that some CIO/CFO/CEO reads in a trade mag, rather than doing true critical analysis. Going to India may make sense for lots of companies, but certainly not to the level we've seen it lately.
At one time, unions were sorely needed in the U.S. Workers had no rights and were thoroughly abused by rampant capitalists. The unions did a good thing there.
Then the unions kept going, demanding more and more. Now in some cases, the work doesn't get done at all because the union guys are too busy taking breaks, waiting for wacky regulations to be met, demanding pay raises, waiting for a seventh guy to show up before they can move a chair... all that unbelievably abusive stuff that unions do now.
So while laborers in third world countries suffer under miserable conditions, American unions keep fighting for higher wages and, well... less work. Is it any wonder American jobs are flying out of the country?
If anyone is interested in a solution to this seemingly intractable problem, there is one and only one: for American Unions to stop fighting for ridiculous benefits in the states and instead to focus ALL of their attention on third world countries.
If Americans stopped getting lazier and if third world workers started getting some equity... presto... these enormous disparities between our workers would start to diminish.
I'm sure in some way, Paul McCartney is making money... I mean, aren't most songs just Beatles ripoffs anyway? I'm sure he's getting royalties... at least for every Oasis song sold.
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
They keep bouncing from outfit to outfit, getting salary bumps with each move.
This applies to China as well.
Time to wake up eh, I read the headline as "Why Apple Baked out of India".
What you guys are failing to realize is the size of India. As Banglore has become expensive companies are moving to other cities. People like to be in Banglore because it is the epic center, but there are hundreads of other major cities.
Apples 30 jobs are meaningless when last year alone infosys hired nearly 200,000 people, wipro 50,000 etc.
The next day after apple news, IBM announced they are investing 6 billion in India.
EOM
The article describes Jobs as "a tough-minded executive who knows when to cut and run."
What? Cutting and running is always the wrong thing to do, in all situations, under all circumstances. It is always a craven act of cowardice. Nervous-Nellyism.
A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Stay the course. Never give up the ship! Now matter how deep you are in the Big Muddy, the right decision is always to push on. Where would the lemmings be if they had turned back? What if Custer had chosen to retreat?
Doesn't Jobs remember the Think Different posters with the pictures of Icarus, Captain Ahab, and the Earl of Cardigan?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I hear you! Is OnStar based in Alabama?!?! If it isn't Mammy, it's Scarlett O'Hara.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste, and what that means is—I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they they don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product, ehm, and you say, why is that important? Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products, and, ehm, so, I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success—I have no problem with their success, they've earned their success for the most part—I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products."
— Steve Jobs
Bonsai Kitten: TNG
I've never been a fanboy of outsourcing especially at the expense of dismantling a work force's morale and decimating career goals and plans strictly under the auspices of driving profits. Personally I think these beancounter CPA-driven approaches are short-sighted and incur more damage than benefit.
And now, these large companies turn their noses up at India and their work force. I can't think of anything more insulting (and embarrassing) than, from the article: " Another source familiar with the situation, though, says the decision was cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source says. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." Apple feels it "can do [such work] more efficiently elsewhere."
WTF? So, even in Apple's case, it ISN'T about quality of service, it's strictly (or so it seems) about bottom line. Can't say I feel totally sorry for India, it's a direct outgrowth of their own success, and I was one of the casualties of an outsourcing/cost cutting rave (turned out pretty well, though). But it's disconcerting to think everything becomes only about money to the exclusion of seemingly any other factors.
I mean, aren't most songs just Beatles ripoffs anyway?
Why yes, 'Master of Puppets' is obviously derived from 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.' I'm not sure about 'Jesus built my Hotrod', though.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
How much do you personally contribute to those companies' bottom lines?
If you're not spending big bucks, making them a lot of money, don't expect top-notch service -- it's too expensive. Re: Amex, get a corporate account -- the support is much better.
Ditto for Dell, I don't know about Apple.
At any rate, you get what you pay for... and every time you pay a little less than expected, keep in mind that part of what you're NOT paying for is better service.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
You know, there are easier ways to commit suicide than taunting Liam Gallagher in an online forum.
Of course that might change.
Also note that Americans and Europeans have an inflated opinion of Chinese people. The vast majority of Chinese to immigrate to the 'west' in the last few decades have been graduate students in technical subjects.
In other words most of what we've seen is their top 1%. China has inbread rednecks, arrogant sons of politicians and criminals same as anywhere else.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yes, but hippies don't like anything that favors corporate America in any way, so they would not support sending jobs to India, even if it helps people over there.
And to can compare what is happending in Indai to the "Dot Com" era in the US. Lot's of people entered the tech market for the money, many jumped jobs every 6 months for better paid jobs. If you were in anyway good technically you could command a premium wage. Sounds famaliar? (Then the arse fell out of the market).
Indian developers in India are basically doing the same thing, they're taking advantage of a tight labour pool. And the really good developers/techies in India are getting good wages and aren't likey to jump ship to some "new" US (or European) company looking for low-cost India programmers.
For example I know of a manager who was told to hire the 3 new employees in India. He was was there for 2 weeks, settled on 3 lads and on the start date only one showed up. I'm sure the other 2 got better jobs based on the job they had in hand, or got headhunted.
I've been saying to others that at the moment I suspect that any company trying to start an India technical operation at the moment will have a hard time of it because all the good technical people already have good paying jobs and the only people they'll be likely to recruit will be medicore. Unless they pay good wages, and lead to an expectation of a long-term job.
I think at the moment if a company wants good staff for less money they may do better looking at locations inside the US such as Salt Lake City and other mid-Western states.
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
Cardigan? The one who sent the Charge of the Light Brigade off in the wrong direction through ego and stupidity? Apple used him on a poster?
Damn them!!
Three Squirrels
Idiot grammerian.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Good HR and hiring is important, but I'm afraid there is just too much money moving around to finese things. I worked US-side in a company that ran India-side outsourcing. I interacted with the India team every day. It was interesting to watch: The people there seemed happy, but once they worked for a year they left. I suspect it was for money. Can't blame them; when there is so much money coming into an economy and businesses are trying to grow by leaps and bounds, and even small increases in skills earned on-the-job are suddenly of great value, you first demand a raise and then you jump. Hopefully those I knew briefly ended up in quality jobs for good companies. I know they are doing much better financially than just a few years ago.
:) But it was well worth my time.
Me? After 3 years I was encouraged to quit. Essentially, I was outsourced
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Liam only browses Slashdot at +5. My comments will go unnoticed.
That premise is just ridiculous. Liam Gallagher reading Slashdot? Noel maybe...
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
Painstakingly.
Typos.
Insert "and" just before "came".
Indeed.
1) That's disappearing.
2) It-apostrophe-s is a contraction for "it is". "Its", on the other hand, is possessive. Counterintuitive, but that's English for you.
So to recap, you should have written "disappearing up its own asshole.". Have a nice day.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Soon they'll build an India so big, it will DESTROY THEM ALL!
How much is a living wage? Is it different if I'm single and live with 3 roommates? How about if I have 12 children (6 with "special needs")?
Should I expect to have to provide my employer with more work (or more valuable work) for the higher "living wage" I need for my family situation?
Because I thought I was supposed to get a "working wage" -- based on the value of my work.
The UK's second largest electricity distribution company, PowerGen, has just announced that it's closing its Indian call-centres and bring the jobs back to the UK due to poor customer service issues.
Your arguement does'nt work. Supply one counterexample.
Even in the case of unskilled labor the worst kleptocracys are not drawing much investment (investment is pulled out as fast a feasable). Look at what happens when they steal the foreign investment via nationalizations. (typically they lose the industry just nationalized due to lack of capital to keep it running.)
Preemptive counterarguement: No the USA is not a kleptocracy. Most built in thievery in the 'first' word is via taxation and payout to the choosen (e.g. in the USA Haliburton, the NEA, government employees). As our taxes are lower and 'couch sitting, check cashing' classes less entrenched the USA has most of europe beat on this test (the exception being Ireland, the low tax, rapid growth center of europe).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
6 billion over 3 years isn't really all that much, but it is a good start. IBM has made plenty of mistakes in its past *cough* Microsoft *cough* and even more recently have done some questionable things. This could very well turn out to be another folly of theirs. They are slow to move, and slow to correct. The fact that I'm already seeing companies in the U.S. bypassing India and outsourcing to China says something. Don't ever underestimate the greed present in the States. If a company can save even just a few cents by setting up shop somewhere else (i.e. China), then they'll do it in a heart beat. On the flip side, I'm also notcing a trend of American companies setting up shop in more rural areas of America, where cost of living is cheaper. From this side of the ocean, it appears everyone is looking for alternatives already.
Regards,
Steve
Honestly, people give China all kinds of shit (rightfully so) for human rights violations, but no one raises a peep about the Indian caste system.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2839047.stm
If China respected foreign investors' money sufficiently, we wouldn't be censuring China either.
India is the "largest democracy in the world" but if there is social justice there, then I'm CowboyNeal and I have a date tonight.
Capitalism wants cheap labour and Western Politics is the art of smooth-talking mostly ignorant NIMBY voters. Western leaders don't have the guts to stand for and live by principles and the truth is that most of the people in the West don't have the guts either.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Their IT industry is in it's infancy, labor is cheap and it's producing some quality engineers. Not to mention infrastructure in big urban cities is almost the same as India's
Hey I left Welchs (the grape company) when I got wind that they wanted to outsource IT to India. All I have to do is say that don't train the outsourcing personel. Look for a new job and put off the "trainig" and "documentation" as long as you can. If we all stick to this, no matter what country we are from, we will make outsourcing fail. The last I heard from friends that are
riding it out said that it's taking 5 outsourced employess to do my job, and the turn around is very slow. HA! Good!
All of us need to stick together on this. Don't stay and hang around for a severance package, post your resume on Monster or
whatever job search board you like and bail when you find the right job.
Let's float outsourcing down the ganges (I think that's where the Indians send thier dead.)
And here I was hoping that a multi-million dollar corporation actually make a decision based upon moral values. LOL
Oh well, back to reality! =/
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
That isn't saying anything much about the society. Racism has been "illegal" in the US for about the same time now, but if you think it doesn't exist in the society, then you're probably blind or white (or both). (Cue KKK, discrimination lawsuits, etc).
Just shows, how lack of proper details about a situation can manifest itself into prejudice. Caste system in India is a non-entity in the way it used to be. The reserved castes (earlier called lower castes) now get active affirmative with as much as 70% of some colleges purely earmarked for them. Publicly distinguishing people based on caste can get you to jail
The caste system does not violate human rights, and commenting on an issue without understanding it just makes people look asinine.
I can attest. I called American Express 2 months ago. First when I got connected I noticed the lag in the phone call... It is obvious the call is not in the US. Second the guy had an accent.
the call went on fairly well I would say, except at the end he asked me if he could tell me and read me about a promotion offer they had. I said no, I had no interest in it (It was for a reward program). He insisted saying it would only take me 2 minutes. I keep on refusing and he became _really_ rude about it. I couldn't believe it...
I also receive a lot of phone calls from recruiters. I would say that 1/3rd of them seem to be coming from India I am sure. First sign is again the lag in the call, _really_ bad phone quality, then someone over the phone with an accent starting invariably with "how are you doing today Sir?". Sometime it is to invite me to job fair, etc, when I refuse, often they get rude saying it will only take so little of my time. Often I am busy and I tell them I have to call them back. They insist very rudely on me giving them a time to call back. i tell them _I_ will call back and come up with plenty of excuses for me to not call back. At the end I always end these calls.
The only thing I would have to say is that I mostly have had either bad or below average experiences in this. I hate when I am connected with a call-center in India. I hate the delay in the phone conversation, the poor quality of the phone call, and often the attitude the cust-rep have on the phone.
Personally I would rather pay a little premium to have a great customer service, support, LOCAL in the us than dealing with this crap of outsourcing call-centers.
I have to say, outsource all of this to rural America, do the call centers in the middle of nowhere. Local people will be very happy, it will bring some money to these areas, labor laws are mostly the same and I have noticed one important thing... People here are SO much nicer and agreable to talk to! It makes it much more of a pleasure to deal with.
Thank you, come again.
the cover story of the Nat'l Geographic last year sometime disagreed with your assessment, detailing litanies of abuse from the burning of the house of an untouchable who drank from the wrong tap to throwing acid in the face of another for some social tresspass. Unfortunately, the whole article is unavailable online, but here's the teaser: http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0306/featu re1/
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
We were going to buy a house in Des Moines Io, but the schools in Cedar Rapids Europa are so much better.
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
That would be surprising. In India the temperatures are given in celsius and if a tech doesn't know what it is, I would wonder if they are from India.
As to your example:
And of course, the USA's finest... *drumroll* being told that component cables would not increase the quality of picture on my PSX games
Here is a similar example experienced in USA. I once went to the Radio Shack store in International Mall in Miami, FL and asked for a wireless keyboard. The salesman laughed at me in his loud voice for all the customers to hear and said that there was no such thing as a wireless keyboard.
Clueless people exist everywhere.
In a lot of the developing world, they are skipping conventional and expensive and now old-fashioned ast century tech infrastructure roll-out and going to the next generation tech, decentralised (and alternative energy, solar, etc) electric power and wireless networks instead of fixed wires. Here is an article on what India is doing to bring electricity to the 1/2 billion people that don't have it yet.
http://www.dawn.com/2006/06/14/int6.htm
And just because apple puled out doesn't mean any number of other tech giants aren't going in. Intel, IBM, MS, HP etc, etc are all dropping serious folding cash into India right now. Apple is one of the few that *aren't*. Apple has pulled some lame biz decisions in the past, this is probably one of them, IMO.
And I bet you thought you were joking.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The same thing is going to happen in South Africa as well, they are already "exploring" land rearrangements based totally on race. They will screw over their producers in favor of party toadies, just like they did in rhodesia/zimbabwe. And the crime problem there is out of control, completely. It will take a little longer than than it did in zim, but it'll happen.
Did Apple back out of India or are they thinking of backing out of India? The article title doesn't match the article.
I don't agree with some comments that Apple is concerned with the quality of labor as opposed to the cost. I don't have the facts in front of me to cite, but from talking to people who have worked in, lived in, and done business with both India and China, what I see is that the low cost of labor is the ONLY thing those countries have going for them. I talked to a fellow who did assembly line automation consulting, and he spoke of how horrible labor-intensive Chinese factories are. The labor there is only one fifth as efficient as the US, but one tenth the price. I didn't hear similar comparisons about India, but I did hear that, outside of the major cities, $5,000 a year (well, the equivalent in rupees) was a comfortable salary to raise a family on. The cities (Bombay, (Mumbai), specifically, weren't as expensive as the US but still much higher than rural areas and small cities.
Evidently, what keeps some Indians in the United States is the much higher standard of living here in terms of public life and public infrastructure. That is to say, the roads are paved, the garbage is picked up, the police aren't completely corrupt, etc. Even though they could 'live like kings' if they took the dollars they made in the US and went back to India, they don't want to be around the filth and misery that is much of India. Again, I am heavily paraphrasing what I've heard, so take this with a lump of salt.
And it's true that certain things cost much, much more in India. For instance, much computer equipment. Some people make a living just by buying stuff in the US and getting it through India customs avoiding tarriff. Another huge expense is the cost of Internet connections. I read something somewhere that the cost of a VOIP phone line/Internet connection in an Indian call center is higher than the cost of the worker answering the phone!
Personally, if I were outsourcing from the US I'd seriously consider a country often overlooked - Germany! The quality of work, the work ethic, the infrastructure, and the education are all very high. Many, if not most, of the younger population of Germany speak English to some extent. A good portion of these are quite fluent. In Eastern Germany (meaning the former GDR), wages are low, real estate is really cheap, even in the cities, and the government has many incentives for businesses willing to employ a number of people (AMD is building another chip foundry is Dresden, Porsche and BMW have recently built factories in Leipzig). The disadvantage of Germany is that taxes are pretty high. But they're not as bad as some countries, and there's evidence that they at least won't be going up anytime soon.
In other words, let us exploit you, it's for your own good :-)>,
This encourages governments to be efficient, but also creates a race to the bottom on standards. "Exploitation" is more complex than good/bad. Wealth is more than money. A lot of the "wealth" from "exploitation" comes for hiding real costs. Creating huge negative externalities which aren't measured and thus removed from the bottom line.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Apple backed out of India for the same reason that some others have. It's not efficient to run small operations there. India has a cheap workforce there but it has a lot of other side issues that no one talks about. For example, if you want a chunk of land to build your office, not only do you have to buy it, but you'll probably have to bribe someone in the process. Same goes with water permits, operating licenses etc.. There are full time consultants who's jobs are to work out the bribery angle. Hell even the US government's consulates have admitted to paying bribes. This is standard practice in third world countries. The only way to make an efficient business is to employ thousands of workers which makes up for the briberies with low wages. Employing a small amount of workers won't make up the difference despite the lower wages. Operating in India has its headaches and can only be done in a large scale manner.
In my opinion I dont think there is any country or a group of people that cannot do a certian job with the proper training and sufficient time.So if work is being outsourced to India or anywhere else for that matter, it can only be because of the cost.
Anyone who thinks that people from one country can code better than people from another country are absolutely wrong and biased in their opinions.Yes, one group might take longer to adapt to the conditions or require more time to train but thats about it.I know its tough for anyone who loses his job because someone else will do it cheaper but thats the way all business's work! Don't they?
Lord of the Binges.
I never said Liam would actually read Slashdot. I'm not sure if Liam reads at all, but he has gotten in a few fights with people who didn't agree with him that Oasis is the greatest rock band EVER! Maybe Noel will tell him, or maybe one of the tech geek roadies will tell him, then one day , Liam will blind side you. He'll pin you to the ground and sissie slap you say "Oasis is the coolest." and "Liam is a god." You'll see. He's like that.
Bottom line, slaves require constant supervision just to keep them digging ditches. They are a bad economic proposition.
Outsourcing is nothing like foreign aid. (which you correctly state helps noone but the kleptocrates.)
All a nation needs to reproduce the India's economic growth is decent technical education. Hopefully someone in Africa will pay attention (but I would'nt bet on it).
China is the key player. Watch their domestic economy, when it turns the corner to consumerism the whole world will shake from the economic fallout.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Apple never had tech support personnel in India that you might have interacted with.
And everyone I know has been frustrated with Tech support - regardless of where it's located. I've had to deal with Sprint customer service with weird accents (some Filipino, some Hispanic). An average Indian has a 'cleaner' accent than people from these countries. But what is interesting is that we have Americans who have emigrated from all these countries and so Americans may have an accent that is even more difficult to understand than Indians.
Much of the anger against customer service professionals in general is diverted to Indian or foreign professionals in particular.
2+2=5 for very large values of 2.
The difference is that in China it's the government doing the abuse, while in India the government has been fighting actively to get rid of the caste system.
6 billion over 3 years isn't really all that much :)
Why India will always remain a low cost IT outsourcing destination is because of this simple model.
$6 Billion * 46(Rs) = Rs27,600 crores. That's a hell lot of money in India. Check out any Indian company annual report and their expenditure is roughly 1/10th of Rs27,600 crores
India produces not so quality grads every year, but in quantity for sure. These grads are desperately looking for jobs and don't mind slogging 12-15 hours a day on low wages, without any Insurance, 401K, etc. What Indian companies typically do is train these fresh grads and dump the work under supervision of few experienced engineers. This model will remain and continue. Trust me, India has so much population, economics works totally different here. Their is no threat to IT/Non-IT companies living on outsourcing model - Indian, Chinese or Russian, doesn't matter.
IBM is largely a services company, always has been, and even more so now after the sale of their PC division. The vast majority of their staff are consultants for hire. For IBM it makes sense to invest in India because the Indian market for consultants is booming both because of the outsourcing craze, but also because the Indian economy is booming and homegrown IT companies are getting to the size where they're becoming a large potential market for IBM. To service that market, IBM needs local resources. Establishing research centers is vital, because it allows IBM to grow and retain staff that would be hard to keep in a pure consultancy play.
For Apple, on the other hand, there are few benefits to hiring people in India, as their primary revenue source is hardware/software and consumer products/services (like iTunes), none of which require a large presence on the ground in the local markets.
They don't need to, at least for a phanboi like you who totally sucks Steve Jobs cock.
No more cheap labor! Next please..
In that case, given the growth in India at the moment, your HR team will not find suitable staff as people will simply look elsewhere. If you want to keep staff in India, you will have to expect to offer frequent salary reviews, and make very sure you know exactly what your staff is worth in the local economy.
That is where a lot of companies - they have to realise that good employees is an asset that rapidly increases in cost in most market, and particularly in a market where his/her skills are in short supply, and if they don't ensure they adjust the salary accordingly, they will loose staff.
Why should any employee feel loyalty to an employee that undervalues them by paying less than the going rate?
In the end it's a matter of deciding what is most important: To retain staff or to keep salaries low. High turnover has a high cost (recruitment and training is expensive), so it's a matter of striking a balance. If staff can find jobs elsewhere at a significantly higher pay than what you paid them, then you have to ask yourself why, and seriously question if the reason is that you don't know how to properly assess the value of your employees.
Really, no offense but you are woefully ignorant of the status of "alternative energy". It works, going in all over, at 10 watt to the multi mega watt levels. Wind power is not almost equal to the cost of coal generated electricity. solar is still higher, but if all you have is a hut sitting out in the hot sun...you think it's cheaper to put in conventional? really? Isn't that part of the article I linked, conventional costs *more* in a lot of cases?
The last place we lived as caretakers was fully solar PV powered, the main owners house at 7,000 square feet and our rig. They ran full upscale upper middle class fully electric everything from it, and total cost including labor for install was around what a reasonable car costs today, which compared to the cost of the house was a few percent. The cost could have been dropped a lot with homeowner sweat equity in the install, and that is US full "what the market will bear" cost on hardware and labor.
There are wind generators out there now putting out more than two megawatts, and home owner sized wind rigs are in the multi kilowatt range now and solar you can get any size you want. I know I lacked for nothing, full desktop computers, etc, refrigerator,freezer,run the washing machine, etc, all normal stuff. When the entire rest of the local area went down for a *week* from an ice storm we missed absolutely nothing, zero, didn't even know the grid power was down until I saw the local street lights in the distance wern't on. I mean..can't beat it with two sticks. it's clean power, too, better than grid supplied.
While you are doubting, others are doing, run some google searches and get up to speed on the subject. There are new factories going in all over the planet to expand production of solar PV (because it is selling like crazy because it "just works") and every doubling of manufacturing output is dropping the price 20% (economy of scale). There are new concentrator PV panels coming to market soon and a plethora of new battery tech.
And as to "UPS", well dang vern that is a primary part of alternate energy rigs, having your own battery bank and smart chargers and inverters, all that is a big UPS system that is modular and has some solar PV or wind charger hooked to it.
Got copies already - they work eerily well.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
"The caste system does not violate human rights"
n t.do?id=ENGUSA2005100705001
Amnesty International seems to disagree with you on this issue:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/regions/americas/docume
Abuses against dalits are numerous and take many different forms, they include (but are not limited to):
* Socioeconomic discrimination
* Beatings, slashings, and other forms of torture
* Arson - the burning of dalit communities
* Violence against women
o Rape, gang rape, and the parading of women through the streets naked
+ As a form of punishment
+ As the right of the upper-caste male
+ To punish or embarrass the woman's family
o Beating and torture of women
* Summary execution, many times by burning alive
* Bonded labor
* Denial of rights, especially land rights
* Police abuses against dalits, custodial abuse
Exactly *how* does this NOT violate human rights?
You're lucky. My father wanted to buy a Dell comp. He got through to Malaysia. He knew the computer he wanted to buy but he didn't want to pay by credit card. He wanted to deposit the money into an account. This took one and a half months and twenty faxes. He can be a stubborn bastard sometimes.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
As has already been mentioned: the jobs in question are tech support, i.e. customer service, not programming or I.T.
Please read before flaming.
I was just reading an article in the NYTimes about Dell.. for the first time (ever?) they grew slower the the PC market overall. They said one of the reasons was because the Indian tech support was so poor, it was hurting their reputation. So they will start moving tech support jobs back to America.. they said it will be a few years though.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
The Register ran a related story yesterday;g en_call_centre/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/06/16/power
My own experience with a global callcenter, the one of Equant, offices in Britain, Egypt, India and some other more obscure asian location, is appalling:
Problems that used to take under an hour to get resolve can now take up to 25 hours. They are passed around the globe/timezones, to people who can barely make themselves understandable. Just to end up at the original center again. Laughable. If it wasn't so darn critical to our own services: The center is the service phone of one of our main network providers to abroad.
Once they even called the wrong contact phone in return, to our Infrastructure boss, in the middle of the night. He was sound asleep at the time, of course. When he woke up, he noticed there was an unanswered call from Egypt but never bothered to call back because assumed it was a freak call. A relative of some immigrant calling the wrong number or similar. Equant had initially promoted their service as one with a local (norwegian) call center, and with a scandinavian HQ in Sweden. "Now in your own language", ran the commercial. They later "forgot" to mention it all got outsourced. Ta daa.
The latter blunder gave us a solid refund, btw. Our CEO took the first flight to England and set things straight. But I have a hunch expenses like that aren't worked in to the maths of outsouring cost "benefits" right from the start. I'm not very surprised the outsourcing fever is cooling down by now. It allways appeared rather overhyped to me.
Umm.... I was talking about the US, not India. I have no issues with India to be honest. The reps are friendly, helpful, and have about the same english ability as Americans in my experience. ;)
Since most countries will have a higher living standard, consider the worst case problem:Sounds like what the bleeding hearth leftists want, but implemented by the economist right wingers...
If your country is mismanaged, you have to write code for half the pay of people living in better managed countries.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
When I was in india, we constantly had problems with flies hovering over our meals in restaurants. They were *everywhere*. One would eat with their right hand, and keep waving the left above the plate to keep the flies off. That's when I heard an expression that stuck with me: "Eat s*&^it, 200,000,000 flies can't be wrong."
I can hire Java guys Bangalore with 3-5 years of experience for $3K a month, and that includes facilities, a PC, network, etc. He may not be brilliant, but he is cheap. Cost of employment there is $36,000 a year. Cost of employment on his American equivalent would be well over $100,000 a year. Most every article I see on outsourcing skews these numbers horribly. Its as though they've never gotten an actual quote in researching their articles. You can hire graduates for $700 a month, if you've got an office. The problem with direct hiring is retaining people. A guy will leave you for $800 a month with zero notice.
Apple's problems would be a little different as they were creating a call center. In my opinion, outsourcing call centers is a TERRIBLE idea. Culture matters in customer service, and giving a guy named Ganesh the name George and forbidding him from giving out his real name is hardly the equivalent of actual cross-cultural education.
Call centers in India are for companies that don't give a shit about customer service. Development centers are not neccessarily this way. The fact that the Apple Service tech I talk to is intimately familiar with technology because he's been a computer dork since age 5 and that he is acclimated to the Western hemisphere matters in whether I recieve satisfactory customer service. Not that customer service for an IT company is a dream job, but in the states people have options and so this job attracts a certain type of person.
A person that is well suited to the job. In India, where opportunity is limited and jobs affording entry to the middle class are not very diverse, this is not the case. If you're from the right city, and you can't become a doctor or a software engineer by getting a CS degree or any engineering degree and then becoming an indentured servant in exchange for training, you try to work at a call center. This being the case, odds are you are not suited to this work, and cultural barriers aside, will suck at it.
It is ironic that 'high value' activities like software development can be successfully outsourced, but 'low value' activities like customer service cannot.
In engineering, your American domain experts can act as quality assurance personnel, ensuring that code from Indian engineers who may not have a perfect grasp of the problem you're trying to solve never reaches the customer if it is not precisely what is required. Your American engineers will also be the source of creativity in creating novel solutions to business problems.
Thats not to say that Indians are not creative. They are, and increasing R&D development on the subcontinent proves it. But if you are starting an Indian subsidiary or are outsourcing work to an outsourcing firm, your Indian engineers will lack sufficient domain expertise to be effectively creative until they are more experienced in your domain. Whats more, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and New Dheli are such competitive markets that employee turnover rate is quite high, and so an investment of domain education is often lost when an employee moves on to the next job.
So you've got to have a competent team of engineers stateside who can parcel work out effectively to your Indian engineers. And in order to retain them, you've got to make your Indian engineers feel that they have a future with your company. You've got to inspire them, to make them feel that they are part of something meaningful. You've got to sell them on your mantra. The work has to matter. This is easier said than done, as you are probably 10 or more timezones away. But the bottom line is, that to get the most value from outsourcing software development, you have to take an active role in managing your Indian subsidiary or contract employees.
The culture in Bangalore in particular is one of distrust and deceit. Employees are used to being mistreated and lied to. Stock options are promised and then never materialize. Engineers work on substandard equipment. Management is completely cynical because of the turnover r
I suspect Apple did not expect the cost of "good" Indian customer support (by Apple's standards) to be so high. Outsourcing companies advertise their "cheap" costs (like Dell $299 PCs), but the good Indian support (like Dell XPS) costs considerably more.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Apparently, there are a lot of companies, mostly financial ones, moving in and are trying to establish a base here for the Asia-Pacific region, so there's a lot of sudden demand for technology-architects and such.
More than mere navel gazing.
Affirmative action for lower castes and illegality of caste-based discrimination came from Gandhi, not the Brits. The Brits employed "divide & conquer" management techniques, to keep the castes and religions at a constant discord. The Indian constitution written after independence from Britain in 1947 was the first to formally abolish the caste system, and offer affirmative action (called "reservation" in Indian parlance) for the downtrodden castes.
Heh, I did better than you think, seeing as how that post wasn't run through any spell check or even any significant proofreading. Anything serious I run through spellcheck/somebody else. Slashdot doesn't qualify.
It was a typo, I do that fairly frequently. I catch most of them, but one usually slips through.
I don't read AC A human right
http://sikhissues.blogspot.com/2006/01/al-qaeda-of -india-rss-vhp-bjp-orthodox.html
c e
I think America should NOT outsource to India till a comprehensive social security plan is implemented in India. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_insuran
Otherwise America is contributing to "race to the bottom" in India where 85% of people do not even have bank accounts. http://in.rediff.com/money/2005/dec/01guest3.htm
IMHO you are crazy to run customer service operations out of India.
Ask yourself: When the customer gets on the phone and hears that Indian voice, are they happy or are they pissed? I would vote for pissed.
Not a good start to your customer service call.
Dell IBM AMEX SPRINT many others flying into the Philippines. In fact, many Indian call center companies are coming here too.
Wages are going up, electricity and internet are expensive. At least the Filipino reps make their customers a little less mad than the Indian reps.
Learn About Outsourcing. http://www.pioutsource.com
Is it only me that gets frustrated when my calls are piped over to India?
Don't worry, soon, both your calls and Indians' calls will be piped over to some english speaking african country. And if you can't stand african accents, don't worry, later on when outsourcing will be over due to the lack of interesting countries to outsource to, your calls will be pipped to good ole Alabama
You just got troll'd!
you could rent a carboard shack for $5/month, but nobody who can afford not to would.
All these people giving speaches to planning commissions or writing letters to the editor crying about "affordable housing" fail to understand what truely makes housing affordable.
Hey, don't lump all of us Americans in with the people in the southeast. We don't all talk like that.