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Massive Chasm In Asia's Public Sector IT Spending
IT_Sleep_Bag writes "A recent study by Springboard Research shows a massive chasm between countries in the APAC region, with countries like New Zealand and Australia investing up to USD 200 per capita on IT, while India and China spend a dismal USD 1. SDA Asia speaks to Dane Anderson of Springboard Research to explore the reasons for the wide gulf and why he believes India and China will grow the fastest in this regard."
How about industrial espionage? Ask Cisco, Nortel and Juniper how much Huawei gear violates their patents...
Why spend when you can steal?
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
It's nice to see someone with at least one semester's worth of economics classes on Slashdot.
Now, let's not kid ourselves here: the poor developers in India are being exploited. The average salary is around $390/mo.; a kid working part-time down at the local McDonald's in the U.S. make far more money than that. Sure, the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books and computers (and commodities such as drinking water, electricity, and gasoline) still cost the same or more than they do here.
Convering salaries directly my multiplying or dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity is just plain ridiculous. To sum it up for the economically-inept Slashdot crowd:
Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India and China than they do in the United States. For example: a loaf of bread costs about INR 20 (about $0.43). A monthly lease in a nice, spacious house would be about INR 15000 (about $323). That might seem cheap, but consider this: your average non-American software engineer working in India or China would end up spending about 50% on his or her salary on food alone (Americans, on the other hand, barely spend 8% -- and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering).
If the exchange rates were to suddenly fluctuate (as they have before), employing people in India and China could become economically unviable. However, that would simply translate to more lower-knowledge work ("shit jobs") in the U.S. -- something that no self-respecting American college graduate would go near. Not much damage to our economy there.
And who is this "We" you are talking about? I'm Australian and I certainly associate much more closely with people from South East Asia and the Pacific Island Nations than I do with the US. The few people I do associate with from the North American continent try to disassociate themselves from the US as well.
Open your eyes, we are an Asian nation. Our largest growth markets are China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia. The biggest buyer of our steel (our biggest export in dollar terms) is Japan.
My kids are taught Asian languages at school, not Spanish. They spell "colour", measure in metric, and share time zones with the Phillipines, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Culturaly, Geographically and Economically we are part of Asia. This is not the White Australia age anymore, and Pauline Hanson is not Prime Minister.
The 95% of people of Australasia, including the native peoples, who are not Asian.
There would be a similar percentage of people in Australia who associate much more closely with people from Africa, but that doesn't make Australia an African country either. The south Pacific islanders are highly distinct from the S.E. Asians and don't consider themselves to be a part of Asia in any way either.
Which is probably why they're in Australia, and the other 290 million Americans are in North America.
Australia is:
Culturally Asian? - No
Continentially Asian? - No
Linguistically Asian? - No
Racially Asian? - No
In an identity chasm because of previous political issues? Yes
By that, China is a European country.
By this, learning European languages like English places the world in Europe. And almost nobody is taught Spanish as a second language at school outside of the US.
As does almost everyone outside America.
Europe and Africa share time zones too, and are as similar distance away from each other.
I say call a spade a spade.
I'd like to point out that my post was in reply to the claim that we here in Oz are more closely associated with the US and UK than Asia. It is the opinion of many (probably close to 40%) that the clinging to the USA as currently demonstrated by Bonsai Howard (Bonsai - a little Bush) and the UK as demonstrated by Menzies in the 50's are no longer appropriate or helpful to Australia's future growth and security.
Your post does a great job of attacking my points in isolation, but in no way addresses the thesis that "we" do not unanimously "associate ourselves" with the US and UK, and many of us (particularly those of us from the left side of politics) believe we are an Asian nation.
You do raise a good point with In an identity chasm because of previous political issues? Yes, although I would contend that the "identity vaccuum" is more due to the promotion of predjudice and bigotry by the extreme right in the last 15 years in this country.
The great majority of office workers know how to click three or four icons to start applications, and that's the limit of their knowledge of the OS. Give them an email and wordprocessing app that looks the same (and God knows Open Office is trying hard to clone the interface) and you're done. The small proportion that actually need to use a specific app can stay on MS till it comes time to upgrade, at which time the cost of retraining or converting the app is pretty much the same if they're moving to another OS. Of course, the whole point is that support costs should be much lower. You can argue about that if you like, but I think just on time saved on security alone it'll be no contest.
But that still doesn't change the wrongness of the original post, which was an assertion that "Australia and NZ are completely western and the only way we can be considered part of Asia is by some vague geographical classification."
The attempt to make Australia and NZ out to be "not Asian" based on cultural measures and ignore geography is odd, at the very least. He implies that one can be geographically be part of Asia but not Asian based on culture alone.
It's like Americans claiming they're not Americans because they're western, not native American. There seems to be an Au/Nz tendency to pretend they are a European country. Perhaps because they didn't have a war with the British? But then, Canada didn't, either, and they don't seem so self-concously "not North American" (though they like to point out they are not the U.S.).
Maybe Au/Nz are just afraid of Asia?
If you don't consider Pacific islanders or native Australians Asian, I'd like to hear what your definition of Asian is. Do you include Israel? India? Russia?
Thanks for your total spending figures.
I find these two interesting:
Australia 3,893,928,499.34
Taiwan 1,035,284,044.48
I am Australian and have lived in Taiwan for a year. The two countries have similar total populations (Taiwan a few million more than Australia's 20m) and similar standards of living. Yet Taiwan spends nearly a quarter what Australia does.
New Zealand and Australia investing up to USD 200 per capita on IT, while India and China spend a dismal USD 1
The important thing here is not so much how much they invest in IT, but how they invest it. I mean, seeing how the public sector wasts billions of GBP here in UK on badly designed, badly executed mammoth projects that invariably miss all deadlines, go over budget by several orders of magnitude and then fail, I would rather have them not spend the money at all.
One big factor in why these projects always fail is that IT jobs in the public sector are underpaid, compared to the private sector, so they mostly get the people who couldn't cut in the private sector. And those people make one stupid decision after another. I'd rather see the public IT salaries top those of the private sector; that way at least there would be a chance that our tax money isn't just wasted by incompetents.
Also think of the manpower you can buy with that money. Because a lot of that money goes not just into hardware, but also admins, training, support staff, programmers, etc.
In China an average salary is IIRC around 1000$ per year. In Australia, a quick googling says that in 2000-2001 it was $34,745. It's probably risen quite a bit more since then, but let's say a very conservative estimate of $35,000 a year.
I don't know how much more than the average computer-related jobs in both countries are paid, but let's assume the proportion is the same. (I.e., that if a job was paid $70,000 a year in Australia, the equivalent job would be paid $2000 in China.)
I.e., here's the kick: for the same money, China can hire 35 times more people than Australia. Or conversely, doing the same custom software project in China will cost 35 times less than in Australia.
Let's say your custom government database program needs X programmers, Y managers, Z DBAs, and assorted other personel. The thing is, assuming equally educated people are available to both, then the same number of people will be needed in Australia or in China. But in China those will cost 35 times less. If the whole project costs 35 million dollars in Australia, it will cost only 1 million in China.
I.e., what I'm getting at is that even while China "only" spends 1.3 billion compared to Australias 4 billion, China may well be able to get _more_ stuff for its money than Australia does.
Sometimes comparing everything in pure dollars, or worse yet in dollars-per-capita, can miss the whole point. The point isn't to be at the top of some Top 10 Spenders list, the point is to get some job done. No more, no less. If China can get the same job done cheaper, anything else is plain old irrelevant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
>If you don't consider Pacific islanders or native Australians Asian, I'd like to hear what your definition of Asian is. Do you include Israel? India? Russia?
People use words for geography as codewords for race. By "Asian" he probably means "Han." And because of the way geography has shaped the flow and spread of culture, racial "Han-ness" is a pretty good indicator for other cultural characteristics as well. Australians tend to be white instead of Han, and they tend to use diatonic instead of pentatonic scales. That's it.
Group identity is important to people, but it's fundamentally "other"-ist -- race-ist, sex-ist, etc. It's how it works. If we choose transcendent identities like "enlightened person" then sometimes we can get past it. Unfortunately, geographic labels like "Asian" or "European" have too much history and carry too many connotations to be transcendent, and will naturally alienate people.