While sooner or later, outsourcing companies are going to realize that the customer management is no longer adding value to the products being outsourced since they're providing all the labor and the machinery was paid for long ago,
all they're getting from the US is a string of increasingly irrelevant management directives from people who no longer have to deal with silly things like end users and products, don't assume that there will be justice in the end for the CEOs who not only transferred labor out of the US, but destroyed the companies' value for the stockholders as the outsourcers decide to sell directly to the US public.
The CEOs who are doing this intend to have cashed out by the time their predatory practices destroy the companies they now working for.
Any CEO who's in power when things hit the fan will either be designated fall guys or will be the stupidest and greediest of the current crop, too dumb to know when to "GET OUT OF DODGE!!!", trying to stay just long enough to get one more round of stock options turned into real money.
You really think among the hundreds of millions of people in India, there's nobody who'd make a better CEO than Carly Florina of HP?
However, the problem will take care of itself.
When a company outsources everything to India except management and profit-taking, how long will an outsourcer doing 95% of the work, who knows the end user the company no longer has to deal with, who does the R&D and makes the product... be content with just taking the money the outsourcing company is paying?
And how are outsourcers going to enforce non-compete contracts in courts with judges they can't buy because they don't know the territory?
However, while it'll be nice to see justice done, losing a good chunk of the Fortune 500 overseas won't help us a whole lot, we won't even get their tax money.
Just the bills from our insurance companies, banks, etc.
So do something about it.
Don't buy their (Intel Corp., IBM, Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.) computers (or in Intel's case CPUs) computers. It's as simple as that.
And in general, tell your employers not to buy them, either. And tell your friends (and if you write IT articles, readers) to buy white box and where to get it locally.
Unless your company is in fact national or very large regional, there's no good reason not to buy white-box in any case unless your shop is running Mac... either from a cost, reliability, or service standpoint.
There are certain advantages to being able to take your computer right back to where you got it and say "FIX" if in warranty, and the shop goes out of business, standard parts (instead of proprietary surprises) mean the boxes can be fixed anywhere.
I don't speak any other languages either, but I am not ignorant enough to think that everyone must speak my native language flawlessly. This is the kind of attitude that is going to bury the US someday. You are a short-sighted fool if you think it can't happen.
Ever heard the saying "The customer is always right?" If you sell a product somewhere, your choices are to support the product in the customer's native language or find the customer won't be buying from you a second time. Anyone who doesn't get this won't have to wait until the overall US economy goes down to get buried.
Dell found out about this the hard way, when American customers of an American company couldn't understand the allegedly English-speaking tech support. Why did they only bring back corporate tech support? Because they don't give a fuck about small/individual customers.
The VCs will not fund you. They, too believe in the outsourcing fad. And will keep believing in it until their jobs go to Bangalore, too.
Anybody can start a storefront white box operation... but making it scale to a national level can't be done without external funding and may not be possible even with it.
While I labeled outsourcing as a management fad, there is no reason to believe that the fad won't last long enough to destroy most technology industry in the USA or persuade kids going into college now NOT to get degrees in technology-related fields.
Without tech industries in America, welcome to the Third World. You've presumably read SnowCrash. It's predicated on a "race to the bottom".
Click here for more detail than you ever wanted to know. If he doesn't want to watch something on TV, it's his business. If he uses his political power to decide what I can't see on TV, he's made himself my business. Anybody who manages to stop an episode of a nationally syndicated TV show from airing just because he didn't like the content already has too much political power.
Personally, I look at censorship advocates the same way I look at spammers. Joe Lieberman is no more fit to be President than Alan Ralsky is.
Of course, if Lieberman doesn't get the Democratic nomination, you may feel free to write in Alan Ralsky's name.
The difference between Joe Lieberman and Hilary Clinton politically is that Hilary is easier on the eyes. BOTH are associated with the "centrist" (read corporatist) Democratic Leadership Council... which Bill Clinto n helped found. The word "Bush-lite" is an adequate description.
Go to opensecrets and check his political contributors for yourself. If you support Bush's political program, vote for him, don't bother with Lieberman.
If you were on a jury deciding whether or not to punish someone who'd done personal or property damage to a spammer because he was a spammer, would you vote to convict, regardless of how compelling the evidence?
If you're on that jury, remember that it only take one person to block a guilty verdict. Should you believe that fucking up a spammer is NOT a crime, you can stand up for your beliefs where it counts.
For more information, google on "jury nullification" and "Fully Informed Jury Association. This doctrine is something that judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers will NOT explain to you.
I suspect that an epidemic of violence affecting spammers selectively would be discouraging. The only motivation for spam is profit, and if one is at the very bottom of the Pit (insert equivalent according to your religion), spending one's profit isn't really possible.
I still agree that business are looking for shorth term gains and fail to create the "building block" type products that ensure long-term prosperity.
Remember that the most important compensation for a CEO of a publically traded company is in stock, usually options. To maximize that compensation means that stock prices have to be continously maximized. To do this, one has to do things that keep investment analysts who have no clue about the fundamental business of a company happy.
Outsource customer service to cut costs? Even if the customers are pissed, the CEO's a hero. Cut R&D spending? Great idea. Fire the long-service employees who provide the institutional expertise of an organization in favor of kids just out of school? Perfection!
Outsource enough core business functions so that the outsourcing company knows more about your day-to-day business with respect to making products/services and customer service than you do and you are essentially building future offshore competition that can run your company into the ground? You're on the cutting edge!
Just show continously increasing profit numbers, even if the books have to be continuously juggled to do so. No matter what damage this does to an organization's ability to serve its customers.
Long-term damage to a company is irrelevant to a CEO who's going to be with the company for 5 years or less, all he has to worry about is keeping the investment analysts happy for long enough to cash out. Then, he can repeat the cycle somewhere else or retire.
Maybe individual publishers could be encouraged by Amazon or some other online bookseller to have their own internal Project Gutenbergs.
Try the Baen Free Library> Lots of books, most from pretty well known writers. What you'll often see is the first few books in a series, posted for download (NO DRM) in the hopes you'll buy the current in-print books.
However, I agree with your basic point. There is simply no reason why any electronically typeset book need ever go out of print, no reason why a book should ever stop realizing income for its author and publisher as long as the (M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E) copyright is in force.
The same is true for records and video, of course.
If what you're buying is $200K worth of IT hardware, you WILL be replacing it in a lot less than 10 years. Hard drives wear out, and so do certain power supply components.
Unless your software is written in-house, or perhaps Open Source, is any proprietary company going to bs supporting it in 10 years? How about 5? Will you be able to find what you need that'll run on your machine(s) in 5 years?
The good news is that if you replace the hardware in 3 years, your replacement should cost a lot less than $200K.
I'm not speaking to the depreciation or accelerated depreciation issues, I'm not an accountant and don't know the current IRS rules with respect to IT.
If you're connected to the VC scene, you can probably get it. If you aren't, you get due-diligenced to death, usually by staff members who don't have the background understanding to understand new technology ideas, even if explained in plain English with PowerPoints to back them up.
Would boo.com had gotten funded if it hadn't been presented to VCs through "trusted" channels? Or Dr. Koop's heath site? Of course, Apple and Google managed to get funded. Why? Because their founders knew the "right" people.
And they have not learned from the dot.bomb. If anything, they're "circling around the wagons" even harder, i.e. even less willing to consider ideas that originated from outside their personal networks.
A good case can be made for the VC community being essentially irrelevant to modern innovation.
No, funding the 20th wireless network company is not evidence of innovation, it's evidence of something else entirely. Usually that a batch of investors have an ugly surprise in their future, along with the founders who trusted in promises of not only money, but good advice.
Absence of available VC funding is not a problem if you're working on a problem that can be solved by personal resources, (i.e. a something that's a software project that can be done by one or a handful of people) but anything bigger has to be put in the "someday, maybe" file unless you can find somebody with money that's NOT connected to the VC scene capable of being excited by the possibility of doing something different and making money off it.
Go to Toshiba with an order for 100K HDs in hand with cash to back it up and the promise of regular orders and they will give you prices far under what the retailers pay.
What you say is true, but not especially relevant. Their margins are probably closer to 30-50%. The only company that could sustain 10% margins on hardware and sell music to fill it up as a loss leader is Microsoft.
I think part of Google's "secret sauce" is filtering to weight results after people who do what you just did. . . but you've got the right idea. Now try one link per post at a few more high-traffic blogs, and good luck.
The next step is to get yourself linked at sites that google hits fairly often. Even personal sites that are on google and have been around for a while will work.
In a couple of weeks, you should be in.
While meta keywords aren't nearly as important as they used to be, you should use them anyway. But mainly, get yourself linked from some real sites. Or, get your site mentioned on a high-traffic blog.
Instead of spending some of their money? How about all of their money? They only had $4-5 billion in the bank at the time, and Vivendi was asking $6-7 billion for the music division. Assuming Steve was able to talk them down to $3-4 billion, that would leave Apple with little to no money left over in a bad economy.
Last number I heard was an asking price of $4B, and given the amount of financial trouble they were (and are) in due to mismanagement, a cash on the barrelhead offer might have worked at as little as $1-2B and golden parachutes for the suits. Or $4B. . . but in stock instead of cash.
MS also is hardly the only possible buyer, Dell and HP(Compaq) are also obvious possibilities.
The RIAA record labels, at the expense of most of the rest of us.
Apple chose to buy into the RIAA distribution model when setting up iTunes, and as a resul, is only breaking even on selling music and making its money back on selling iPods.
Instead of buying Universal and being able to bundle a few dozen albums with each iPod free and sell tracks for.25 each at a profit and use their ownership of content as a tool with which to club the rest of the content industry when negotiating per-download proces, they chose to pay bridge toll to the entire record industry and by willingness to pay all of their net income after expenses to the RIAA, reinforced the RIAA's business model and boosted the net cap of each RIAA company.
If they'd managed to leverage their content ownership into much lower download prices, they'd be selling all the downloadable tracks from other companies at a profit, and other computer companies would be using this to beat down prices when they bought their own major labels.
The RIAA labels are very definite winners because their net caps went up. Their attempt to prevent independent competitors from using the Net for promotion via P2P and Internet Radio is a lot less important in the short term.
Instead of spending some of the money they had in the bank, Apple turned digital downloads into a game nobody is going to be able to profit at legally.
Apple belongs on the winners list... at #8. They could and should have been #1, the major consumer electronics players would be on the winners' list, the general public would be on the winners' list, and the suits at all the major labels could have been on the top of the lus3rz list.
Will Apple stay a winner? How long can they sustain the iPod at the current inflated margins? If they can't subsidize iTunes because of shrinking margins, iPod turns from a win to a money-loser.
All it takes are some good competitive products, and Apple hardly has a monopoly on good or even visionary consumer products designers.
If Apple has to cut iPod prices to commodity levels to keep selling them, there go their margins and their ability to keep iTunes alive at a break-even or money-losing basis, more product sales mean more money-losing downloads and more red ink.
If this happens, and I think this inevitable, their short-sightedness will have cost them not only money, but a chance to turn the downloadable music market into a benefit for everybody not an RIAA label executive.
Apple could have made the consumer electronic industry a hell of a lot stronger and boosted their bottom line at the same time.
Instead, there's a pretty good chance that iPod + iTunes in a couple of years will make Steve Jobs look like a dickhead, not a hero.
Apple is making practically nothing in this space, they have publically stated that they buy their music supply from the RIAA oligopoly (aka Hollywood content cartel) at about what they sell it for.
No further proof should be necessary of antitrust violations, if Apple had a meaningful choice of vendors, they wouldn't be essentially providing a profit machine for the RIAA labels.
The only reason Apple can do this is that the download market is essentially subsidized by the iPod.
But I think people would take your confession on the part of Exxon more seriously were you to sign with your name, job title, and an address at exxon where you can actually be reached.
Broadband over powerline really does hose most other forms of RF communication anywhere remotely close to a powerline. That might include your 802.11 network.
It's a bad idea, and this is as good a time as any to bury it.
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all they're getting from the US is a string of increasingly irrelevant management directives from people who no longer have to deal with silly things like end users and products, don't assume that there will be justice in the end for the CEOs who not only transferred labor out of the US, but destroyed the companies' value for the stockholders as the outsourcers decide to sell directly to the US public.
The CEOs who are doing this intend to have cashed out by the time their predatory practices destroy the companies they now working for.
Any CEO who's in power when things hit the fan will either be designated fall guys or will be the stupidest and greediest of the current crop, too dumb to know when to "GET OUT OF DODGE!!!", trying to stay just long enough to get one more round of stock options turned into real money.
However, the problem will take care of itself.
When a company outsources everything to India except management and profit-taking, how long will an outsourcer doing 95% of the work, who knows the end user the company no longer has to deal with, who does the R&D and makes the product... be content with just taking the money the outsourcing company is paying?
And how are outsourcers going to enforce non-compete contracts in courts with judges they can't buy because they don't know the territory?
However, while it'll be nice to see justice done, losing a good chunk of the Fortune 500 overseas won't help us a whole lot, we won't even get their tax money.
Just the bills from our insurance companies, banks, etc.
No problem with getting nations to enforce US law, it isn't needed.
So do something about it. Don't buy their (Intel Corp., IBM, Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.) computers (or in Intel's case CPUs) computers. It's as simple as that.
And in general, tell your employers not to buy them, either. And tell your friends (and if you write IT articles, readers) to buy white box and where to get it locally.
Unless your company is in fact national or very large regional, there's no good reason not to buy white-box in any case unless your shop is running Mac... either from a cost, reliability, or service standpoint.
There are certain advantages to being able to take your computer right back to where you got it and say "FIX" if in warranty, and the shop goes out of business, standard parts (instead of proprietary surprises) mean the boxes can be fixed anywhere.
And let them know why.
Ever heard the saying "The customer is always right?" If you sell a product somewhere, your choices are to support the product in the customer's native language or find the customer won't be buying from you a second time. Anyone who doesn't get this won't have to wait until the overall US economy goes down to get buried.
Dell found out about this the hard way, when American customers of an American company couldn't understand the allegedly English-speaking tech support. Why did they only bring back corporate tech support? Because they don't give a fuck about small/individual customers.
Anybody can start a storefront white box operation... but making it scale to a national level can't be done without external funding and may not be possible even with it.
While I labeled outsourcing as a management fad, there is no reason to believe that the fad won't last long enough to destroy most technology industry in the USA or persuade kids going into college now NOT to get degrees in technology-related fields.
Without tech industries in America, welcome to the Third World. You've presumably read SnowCrash. It's predicated on a "race to the bottom".
What's India's organized crime involvement with the financing of IT outsourcing in Bangalore?
I've heard the same rumors. I wouldn't be surprised if they were true, but I want names, dates, and places before I cite this as fact in the future.
Personally, I look at censorship advocates the same way I look at spammers. Joe Lieberman is no more fit to be President than Alan Ralsky is.
Of course, if Lieberman doesn't get the Democratic nomination, you may feel free to write in Alan Ralsky's name.
The difference between Joe Lieberman and Hilary Clinton politically is that Hilary is easier on the eyes. BOTH are associated with the "centrist" (read corporatist) Democratic Leadership Council... which Bill Clinto n helped found. The word "Bush-lite" is an adequate description.
Go to opensecrets and check his political contributors for yourself. If you support Bush's political program, vote for him, don't bother with Lieberman.
If you're on that jury, remember that it only take one person to block a guilty verdict. Should you believe that fucking up a spammer is NOT a crime, you can stand up for your beliefs where it counts.
For more information, google on "jury nullification" and "Fully Informed Jury Association. This doctrine is something that judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers will NOT explain to you.
I suspect that an epidemic of violence affecting spammers selectively would be discouraging. The only motivation for spam is profit, and if one is at the very bottom of the Pit (insert equivalent according to your religion), spending one's profit isn't really possible.
Remember that the most important compensation for a CEO of a publically traded company is in stock, usually options. To maximize that compensation means that stock prices have to be continously maximized. To do this, one has to do things that keep investment analysts who have no clue about the fundamental business of a company happy.
Outsource customer service to cut costs? Even if the customers are pissed, the CEO's a hero. Cut R&D spending? Great idea. Fire the long-service employees who provide the institutional expertise of an organization in favor of kids just out of school? Perfection!
Outsource enough core business functions so that the outsourcing company knows more about your day-to-day business with respect to making products/services and customer service than you do and you are essentially building future offshore competition that can run your company into the ground? You're on the cutting edge!
Just show continously increasing profit numbers, even if the books have to be continuously juggled to do so. No matter what damage this does to an organization's ability to serve its customers.
Long-term damage to a company is irrelevant to a CEO who's going to be with the company for 5 years or less, all he has to worry about is keeping the investment analysts happy for long enough to cash out. Then, he can repeat the cycle somewhere else or retire.
Try the Baen Free Library> Lots of books, most from pretty well known writers. What you'll often see is the first few books in a series, posted for download (NO DRM) in the hopes you'll buy the current in-print books.
However, I agree with your basic point. There is simply no reason why any electronically typeset book need ever go out of print, no reason why a book should ever stop realizing income for its author and publisher as long as the (M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E) copyright is in force.
The same is true for records and video, of course.
Unless your software is written in-house, or perhaps Open Source, is any proprietary company going to bs supporting it in 10 years? How about 5? Will you be able to find what you need that'll run on your machine(s) in 5 years?
The good news is that if you replace the hardware in 3 years, your replacement should cost a lot less than $200K.
I'm not speaking to the depreciation or accelerated depreciation issues, I'm not an accountant and don't know the current IRS rules with respect to IT.
Would boo.com had gotten funded if it hadn't been presented to VCs through "trusted" channels? Or Dr. Koop's heath site? Of course, Apple and Google managed to get funded. Why? Because their founders knew the "right" people.
And they have not learned from the dot.bomb. If anything, they're "circling around the wagons" even harder, i.e. even less willing to consider ideas that originated from outside their personal networks.
A good case can be made for the VC community being essentially irrelevant to modern innovation.
No, funding the 20th wireless network company is not evidence of innovation, it's evidence of something else entirely. Usually that a batch of investors have an ugly surprise in their future, along with the founders who trusted in promises of not only money, but good advice.
Absence of available VC funding is not a problem if you're working on a problem that can be solved by personal resources, (i.e. a something that's a software project that can be done by one or a handful of people) but anything bigger has to be put in the "someday, maybe" file unless you can find somebody with money that's NOT connected to the VC scene capable of being excited by the possibility of doing something different and making money off it.
Try dozens. Hint: Most Detroit automaker product brand names like Chevrolet, Dodge, Oldsmobile, etc. were separate companies to begin with.
Your search - "The Book Of Four Rings" - did not match any documents.
Your search - "Book Of Four Rings" - did not match any documents.
What you say is true, but not especially relevant. Their margins are probably closer to 30-50%. The only company that could sustain 10% margins on hardware and sell music to fill it up as a loss leader is Microsoft.
I think part of Google's "secret sauce" is filtering to weight results after people who do what you just did. . . but you've got the right idea. Now try one link per post at a few more high-traffic blogs, and good luck.
Do you shop for books and music at the brick-and-mortar WalMart? If you're here, you almost certainly don't.
If a store doesn't have what you want, the lowest price doesn't matter.
It's widely known that WalMart selects its intellectual content to be "family-friendly" and forces publishers to censor what it does buy.
I don't buy censored books and movies and you probably don't, either.
Amazon makes its money selling to literate people, a market the WalMart doesn't even understand.
The next step is to get yourself linked at sites that google hits fairly often. Even personal sites that are on google and have been around for a while will work.
In a couple of weeks, you should be in.
While meta keywords aren't nearly as important as they used to be, you should use them anyway. But mainly, get yourself linked from some real sites. Or, get your site mentioned on a high-traffic blog.
Last number I heard was an asking price of $4B, and given the amount of financial trouble they were (and are) in due to mismanagement, a cash on the barrelhead offer might have worked at as little as $1-2B and golden parachutes for the suits. Or $4B. . . but in stock instead of cash.
MS also is hardly the only possible buyer, Dell and HP(Compaq) are also obvious possibilities.
Apple chose to buy into the RIAA distribution model when setting up iTunes, and as a resul, is only breaking even on selling music and making its money back on selling iPods.
Instead of buying Universal and being able to bundle a few dozen albums with each iPod free and sell tracks for .25 each at a profit and use their ownership of content as a tool with which to club the rest of the content industry when negotiating per-download proces, they chose to pay bridge toll to the entire record industry and by willingness to pay all of their net income after expenses to the RIAA, reinforced the RIAA's business model and boosted the net cap of each RIAA company.
If they'd managed to leverage their content ownership into much lower download prices, they'd be selling all the downloadable tracks from other companies at a profit, and other computer companies would be using this to beat down prices when they bought their own major labels.
The RIAA labels are very definite winners because their net caps went up. Their attempt to prevent independent competitors from using the Net for promotion via P2P and Internet Radio is a lot less important in the short term.
Instead of spending some of the money they had in the bank, Apple turned digital downloads into a game nobody is going to be able to profit at legally.
Apple belongs on the winners list... at #8. They could and should have been #1, the major consumer electronics players would be on the winners' list, the general public would be on the winners' list, and the suits at all the major labels could have been on the top of the lus3rz list.
Will Apple stay a winner? How long can they sustain the iPod at the current inflated margins? If they can't subsidize iTunes because of shrinking margins, iPod turns from a win to a money-loser.
All it takes are some good competitive products, and Apple hardly has a monopoly on good or even visionary consumer products designers.
If Apple has to cut iPod prices to commodity levels to keep selling them, there go their margins and their ability to keep iTunes alive at a break-even or money-losing basis, more product sales mean more money-losing downloads and more red ink.
If this happens, and I think this inevitable, their short-sightedness will have cost them not only money, but a chance to turn the downloadable music market into a benefit for everybody not an RIAA label executive.
Apple could have made the consumer electronic industry a hell of a lot stronger and boosted their bottom line at the same time.
Instead, there's a pretty good chance that iPod + iTunes in a couple of years will make Steve Jobs look like a dickhead, not a hero.
No further proof should be necessary of antitrust violations, if Apple had a meaningful choice of vendors, they wouldn't be essentially providing a profit machine for the RIAA labels.
The only reason Apple can do this is that the download market is essentially subsidized by the iPod.
This is a competitive market?
Only to a Bushman.
But I think people would take your confession on the part of Exxon more seriously were you to sign with your name, job title, and an address at exxon where you can actually be reached.
It's a bad idea, and this is as good a time as any to bury it.