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IBM Tries To Patent Offshoring
Ian Lamont writes "IBM has filed a patent application that covers offshoring employees. Application 20090083107, dated March 26, 2009, is a 'method and system for strategic global resource sourcing.' Figure 2 gives a pretty good idea of what's involved — it shows boxes labelled 'Engineer,' 'HR,' and 'Programmer' with crossing arrows pointing to cylinders labelled 'India,' 'China,' and 'Hungary.' The article speculates that IBM may apply the methodology to its own staff — it reportedly plans to lay off thousands of employees and has even started a program to have IBM workers transfer to other countries at local wages."
Actually, it is just yet another a method of choosing the most efficient way to outsource. They have a model of the cost/benefit for various outsource options, a computer program to evaluate it, and a computer system on which it runs. Nothing as sweeping as "IBM Tries To Patent Offshoring".
Even if they patent it and use it if other people can't because of them .... Honestly though in the global scheme out sourcing is probably a good thing, its just bad for the US.
India is on the brink of a revolution. The creation of a middle class between the very rich and the very poor is imminent. The writing is on the wall and the corporations are already moving on to Africa. So I'll ask again, how many years has it been? The elevation of the poorest people in the world to a western standard of living is happening in our lifetime.
How we know is more important than what we know.
IBM is a typical blue chip company. They get things done, but tend to move slowly, relying mainly on their reputation to differentiate them from the competition. They tend to move slowly, in a systematic way. I think they are an example of where outsourcing could work, because since they are slow already, the normal problems of communicating across a globe aren't going to be as serious.
The main problem they will have is making sure their foreign teams are good. On the other hand, that isn't always an easy problem even with teams in the United States.
Sorry if this goes against the typical Slashdot ideology against outsourcing, but the truth is I feel more sorry for workers in developing countries who might not have running water or electricity 24 hours a day, than I do for an American programmer making $80k a year who might have to look a little harder for a job (that includes me). Spread the wealth. There's enough to go around.
Qxe4
I think somebody jumped the gun on this one. April fools anyone?
No wonder why they want to outsource That's a big number. In my day, patents were slowly incrementing in the 7 figure range. I can't wait until they hire monkeys to type up more applications. IBM made the best typewriters...
Project Match, an IBM offshoring initiative the Standard reported on last month, offers U.S. employees the chance to stay with IBM by relocating to another country, to work in an IBM regional division at local wage rates. IBM has roughly 400,000 employees in 170 countries. As of early February, fewer than ten employees had shown interest in the program.
Maybe if we let IBM patent it then everyone else will stop doing it?
-Xen
yes much better in soviet russia, there patents offshore IBM!
I'm patenting a "Method for doing business without regard to ethical or moral principles."
The cool thing is that patent trolls now have to come to me first - take that assholes!!!!
"Oh my how the money rolls in!"
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Slavery, both ancient and modern has been only been successful in places where its implementation is predicated by state sanction and overwhelming force if threatened. China, India and SE Asia are developing the nascent foundations of worker's unions and it would not be surprising if this populist sentiment will rise to the point where they are at the throats of their governments with calls for better working conditions, human rights and a greater sharing in the financial rewards. Currently offshoring in manufacturing works on the premise that you have a person making 1/10th to 1/1000th of the wage of the people who ship, retail, and design the products. Does that sound sustainable to you?
Just because an idea makes immediate quantitative financial sense for a select few be them landholders or shareholders, the long term economic value of a process is something quite different. It is very much like the difference between weather and climate where one can model accurately the weather systems and their effect on a specific locale for a few days but can't extrapolate that knowledge beyond a certain limit either geographically half-way around the world or temporally years or decades into the future.
As these country's workers gain skills and begin automating the manufacturing processes and need less people in manufacturing both for local needs and export and begin to design and manufacture more for the local markets we are going to see less and less of a world populated with crap designed for Americans and built by others. To expect the rest of the world to serve America's aggrandized view of itself for much longer at the rates of slavery is foolish and for IBM to attempt to capitalize upon an idea with 1000's of years of prior art is just bad patent law and needs to be regulated against.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
They are trying to patent a *technique for evaluating* offshoring.
I love reading /. for the news, but the constant need to deliberately misinterpret the news to spin it into some kind of hysteria is tiresome... This place is Fox for Nerds, News You Can Read Somewhere Between the Lines.
Next thing you know, they're going to patent patenting. Actually, even better: they'll patent patents. At least then maybe the American government will review the law.
Its about time that we taxed software and support from US companies that outsource.
You want to outsource your programmers or call center to India? That's just fine. Now show us how many hours your foreign staff has worked. Alright, now we're going to tax you so much that you end up paying 2/3rds of what you would have paid if you had stayed in the USA. We're putting this money towards unemployment benefits and other social programs, to offset the number of workers you dumped so you could hire someone to do it for five dollars a day.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Looked at the trade deficit lately?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USTrade1991-2005.png
"The US patent system is just broken!!"
Its only broken if we live in a true Democracy. Its totally fine (in the eyes of the ruling elite) if we live in a Plutocracy (ruled by the rich), as then, the people in power, the ones who make the rules, and their rich friends can then buy and control everything (and everyone) with patents and lawyers.
Worse still, as a Plutocracy becomes more extreme it becomes a Kleptocracy (ruled by thieves). After all, its not as if the people who write the laws and their friends in power are giving millions of tax payers money to their rich friends, so they and their friends can prop up their rich lifestyles, while millions suffer the consequences. (Plus few of the rich will be brought to justice for the suffering they cause (after all, their rich friends who write the laws, choose what is considered the law)).
The point is, its far worse than broken. The whole of society is distorted to serve the minority of rich and powerful at the expense (literally) of the majority of people. Therefore the patent system is broken as a symptom of a much larger problem, which is, we don't have a real Democracy (anywhere in the world) as everyone worldwide lives in Plutocracies. Worse still, since the economic problems started, its showing we are at times in a Kleptocracy. It means most of the time, we have been near the extremes of a Plutocracy, which in hindsight makes sense, as the ones in power push as far as they can get away with, until large numbers of people start to see huge problems. Then the ones in power change tactics and move into other areas people can't see, until they become extreme and so on. Currently the patent system is becoming extreme, but its nothing compared with the money now openly flowing around the world, from rich to rich, while millions of other people suffer. Thats new. They are now so openly helping themselves in a huge feeding frenzy they are saying is all for our good. Yeah right.
True it's only bad for countries with nothing to offer. BUT because atm the US is waaay ahead of India in lifestyle wages w/e. It will harm the US. Because it is an equalizer. Right now we have a system in place that is unfair globally, the US and other rich countries are benefiting. Outsourcing makes the economy more fair. That screws everyone currently on the top. Ethically we should be OK with fair systems.
Side note for coding. Coding is VERY easy to export, shipping costs nothing. There are no really special tools involved. Minimal language requirements. All it requires is good brains. So we feel this equalizing force more strongly than other sectors. This results in our average wage not changing much hence our ppp doesn't change. And our wages essentially plummet. Still... those coders in india probably live damn well.
and IBM charge a ridiculous fee for those buisness that want to "use" this patent.
No, but it was good for a laugh...
My point wasn't really to say that it doesn't/isn't effecting the US, only that it's not just the US, or the US is the only one on the negative side.
I'm not an expert, probably not even moderately informed in economics, but I just get kinda of sick of people blaming other countries for the US's imbalance of commerce like the US isn't to blame at all. There are millions of people willing to work, but because of regulations, taxes, insurances, and this ridiculously high standard of living that makes companies outsource, when a lot of the workers are probably willing to do away with all that nonsense and use a basic work = cash, sort of under-the-table thing which seems to be what attracts companies to outsourcing, WYSIWYG systems. Granted in some cases they abuse it, which amounts to basically slavery but that's not a "given".
Lately? It is still huge, but it actually shrank a bit the last two years (the graph cites this file as source data, but is 3 years out of date):
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/historical/gands.txt
And a little less than half of it is oil, which isn't exactly a threat to our ability to manufacture (it is just an expensive habit):
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/Press-Release/current_press_release/exh9.txt
There isn't really anything good about a huge trade deficit, but a ~trillion dollar trade deficit doesn't really prove that a 14 trillion dollar economy is rotten to the core (but I would agree that there are lots of problems).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I got three better words: In re Bilski.
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this ridiculously high standard of living that makes companies outsource
Oh? And what are you willing to do without? Because let me tell you something: to be on par with the standards of living in India and China, you can say 'bye-bye' to having your own place to live. Instead, you and three generations of your clan will be living in a studio apartment. You won't be able to afford a car, you won't be able to afford decent clothes, and you won't be able to afford to eat anything not obtained from a frickin' soup kitchen.
If that's how you want to live, fine. But don't impose your ideals on the rest of us, thanks.
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A patent I can fully endorse. So IBM can corner the market on poorly developed spaghetti, while simultaneously removing the cost advantage to outsourcing by anyone else. The free market is better than regulation!
I have to at least give them kudos to provide such an option. But I'd really be pissed if the target country does not allow reverse visa workers (or something comparable). We should clamp down on such countries. They dump all their products and services on the US, but often have fits if things go the other way. A lot of 3rd-world countries are fair-weather "free" traders.
Table-ized A.I.
Except that that worker is a line worker doing very 'boring' jobs similar to a helpdesk line in the IT world which makes $12/hour tops. The actual wage of a GM line worker is around $25-30/hour but because you need so many of them that is very unsustainable in an economy where 'the other ones' do it at less than half the price. In what sane IT company does a first line helpdesk jockey earn $30/hour when you can hire 2 or 3 for that price?
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The problem is that I pay $300 for Windows while Microsoft sells it in india for $35.
I pay $5 for a pill and they pay $.10 to the same company for the same pill. ( And in many cases- the company is making a profit on that $.10 pill).
I pay $19.99 for a movie, and they pay $2.49 for the same movie.
I pay $1 for an mp3 and they pay $0.00 for the same song (legally!)
I pay $70 for a pair of shoes that goes there for $5.
The corporations have laws passed that make it illegal to buy those pills for $.10 and import them to the US for $1.00 and undercut the company's local prices. Likewise for "region" encoded movies. And I.P. restricted web sites for songs. And "trademark protected" shoes.
So the companies get to hire $5 an hour labor to compete with me at $35 an hour. But I don't get to buy the cheaper products at the cheaper price.
It's bullshit. Our government has been bought and paid for by these companies and is completely corrupt.
They sell the dream that you can get rich-- brainwashing us from birth. But in reality your shot is about 1:1,000,000- as compared to 1:5,000,000 everywhere else.
Insurance is rigged- you are required to take it- but the amounts you pay are grossly over the losses. When the payout exceeds the amounts they owe you, they stiff you or go bankrupt. And "insurance" drives up the prices of every procedure just as "credit" drives up the prices of housing, cars, and everything else.
It will collapse soon. Probably within 12 years. We can't go into debt any more.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Except with the little problem that it is NOT fair. One of the reasons why our standard costs so much is because you can't build smokestacks that spew cancer for 25+ miles in any direction, or dump enough toxic waste into the rivers that anything that touches that shit dies. But instead, thanks to the glories of outsourcing, we can pay an "el presidente" to poison the fuck out of HIS peasants so we can breathe clean air. And that sounds fair to you? All outsourcing does is brings miseries on third world peoples. Just see the filthy air in China, the toxic waste being dumped on China and India, the e-waste being dumped on ALL the third world, etc.
The only way outsourcing equalizes anything is equalizing money into the hands of the rich and the corrupt, while poisoning the poor and insuring a nice premature death from cancer and lots of lovely birth defects. There is a good reason why we can't compete with China. It is because we don't let factories dump poison right out the back into the rivers. And I for one thank every Deity I don't believe in for that. I say while they are outsourcing maybe they should just outsource themselves and their products out of the country. But expecting us to compete with countries that have no rules against toxic waste is frankly fucking stupid and a lie cooked up by ruthless multinationals.The poisons our little outsourcing has wreaked upon the world will end up causing more deaths than the bombs we dropped on Japan. Not really something we should be cheering about.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I don't know how many times you've worked with outsourced software developers, but my experience with them is that:
- If the code done by the outsources needs to connect to code done locally you need to explain them all about the existing code
- Specifically for the teams I work for in India, about 1 in 4 is really good, the rest not really (India seems to be suffering from the same effect as the Internet bubble caused in 2000 - due to the size of the demand for IT professionals, large numbers of people that should never have gone into IT are working as Software developers)
- If you're just outsourcing your coding you need much more detailed requirements and design specs than otherwise. Unfortunately, in this industry good specs (of any kind) are few and far between.
- Any large enough project will have a lot more time spent in requirements gathering, analysis and design than in coding. Actually, with a proper design code is the trivial part.
- You often don't have that much influence in the hiring choices in the remote site. Often enough that means you get landed with completely inappropriate personnel.
My personal experience from working with remotely located developers is that, unless you can give them full, well-specified, self-contained projects, the local developers actually end up spending more time supporting the outsourced developers (due to all the documentation and explanations needed) and reviewing/fixing the code developed in the remote site than they would if they just did the project themselves.
Well I like to answer the "better than starving" argument with "we should be offering our poorer neighbors a friendly hand up, not paying an iron boot to keep them down". Because outsourcing is supporting some truly bad regimes by giving the "el presidente" types plenty of cash while the peasants get to enjoy lead, mercury, PCBs, dioxins,etc. And how is it "better than starving" if you poison their air and land so damned bad that it practically is unlivable?
It isn't like they can just clean this stuff up when the multinational goes somewhere else because they found they could save a nickel by going somewhere else. Just look at how many superfund sites there are in the US where some corp has stuck us with the bill for land that is no longer fit for human habitation. Do we really think the third world will EVER be able to recover all that poisoned land?
I think in the end we will look at the outsourcing to the third world for what it is: the exploitation of the weak by the rich and powerful. In the end this shit is just as evil as slave labor, child exploitation for sex and labor, and every other sick evil thing we have done to the helpless. Only unlike those others this will be killing long after the greedy bastards that dumped it have turned to dust. And folks wonder why so many hate the US?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.