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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.
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?