I'm currently running an ISP in Pakisan. Your perception of the role of government subsidies is inaccurate. Bandwidth is currently provided throughout Pakistan primarily by PTCL (Pakistan Telecom), which untill very recently was a protected monopoly. They are currently selling ISP's bandwidth for about 12 times the cost of their international circuit. We pay $6000/Mb, whereas their cost is somewhere in the region of 400-500 dollars. So if anything, we are getting ripped of royally.
Low internet rates can be attributed to fierce competition in the ISP market. Many ISP's are having to sell bandwidth at a loss, just to try to cover their operating cost. The internet cafe business is also highly competitive. Since a large number of people cant afford computers at home, they generally turn to internet cafes for access. As a result, the country has seen an explosion in the number of net cafes in recent years (Porn has also been a very prominent driving force in the growth of net cafes)
There is currently a campaign underway to try to preassurize the new minister of Science and Technology to reduce bandwidth costs substantially. If this happens, there will be a drastic drop in internet cafe access charges.
I'm currently running an ISP in Pakisan. Your perception of the role of government subsidies is inaccurate. Bandwidth is currently provided throughout Pakistan primarily by PTCL (Pakistan Telecom), which untill very recently was a protected monopoly. They are currently selling ISP's bandwidth for about 12 times the cost of their international circuit. We pay $6000/Mb, whereas their cost is somewhere in the region of 400-500 dollars. So if anything, we are getting ripped of royally. Low internet rates can be attributed to fierce competition in the ISP market. Many ISP's are having to sell bandwidth at a loss, just to try to cover their operating cost. The internet cafe business is also highly competitive. Since a large number of people cant afford computers at home, they generally turn to internet cafes for access. As a result, the country has seen an explosion in the number of net cafes in recent years (Porn has also been a very prominent driving force in the growth of net cafes)
There is currently a campaign underway to try to preassurize the new minister of Science and Technology to reduce bandwidth costs substantially. If this happens, there will be a drastic drop in internet cafe access charges.
Try to read my message properly before responding.
1) I did not call Germans racist, I called the poster racist. This is evident from him calling India a shabby country.
2) I did not say that the company undermined the Indians work (after all, as you said, they hired them). I said that the the Poster and his German collegues probably undermined the effor of the Indians there, wasting company resources in the process.
3) My evidence is based on the posters use of words like "shabby" to classify an entire country. If not racist, how should I categorize the use of this word. Perhaps hateful or ignorant would be more accurate. You think my attitude is "narrow-minded". Perhaps not as narrow minded as judgeing an entire country based on limited experiance with a couple of its nationals.
After reading your comment, I have a feeling that the problem wasn't with the Indians, but rather you and your German collegues. With the sort of racist attitude you have exhibited about India, I have no doubt that you must have tried you best to undermine any work the Indians did. Without support from their supposed collegues, they couldn't possibly have been expected to perform at their optimal level.
You are truly a worthless individual. I can only imagine that most germans would be embarassed to be associated with you.
In this case I believe that MS may have a bit of a fight on their hands. There primary competition is Apple (iTMS), which already has quite a stranglehold on digital music. They already have a deal with HP which puts and iTMS icon on the desktop of every machine that HP sells. This means that a large number of PC's that are sold will come bundeled with Apples software. Apart from this, the iPod has become quite a status symbol. It will take much more than just a device with better WMP integration to dethrone it. Most of the people that buy iPods do so becuase of the cool hypster image that it possesses. These are not tech savy people, and probably wont even notice that their iPod is not compatible with WMP (or at least, wont care). All iPods come with a CD that contains iTMS. Since iTunes is necessary to synch with the iPod, it will be installed on every iPod owners PC. When you add iPod, Apple, and HP owners, you have accounted for a substantial percentage of the population that is interested in legal digital music downloads. If the popularity of the iPod continues to rise, it will just make the competition tougher for MS. This may well be a case where MS will have to find a way to infiltrate Apples market, rather than the other way around. However, the playing field is completely different than it was during the browser wars.
Well, the only advantage that OO has is that its free. Nobody gives a fuck if its open source or supports XML (except geeks). Most people couldn't give a shit about open source, and they are completely fine with proprietary file formats like.doc or.ppt. As far as the improving feature set is concerned, it is merely trying to catch up to what MS Office already does.
EIOffice does introduce a new approach to integration betweeen office applications. This is more than I can say about OO.
As far as the other technolgies, I think the EVD standard is doomed to failure. People are going to want DVDs from abroad, and a player that only does EVD isn't going to sell. No, actually they're going to want to buy foreign movies. They'll expect these movies to be availible to them in China in EVD format, and thats exactly what they're going to get.
[quote]As far as the other technolgies, I think the EVD standard is doomed to failure. People are going to want DVDs from abroad, and a player that only does EVD isn't going to sell. [/quote]
No, actually they're going to want to buy foreign movies. They'll expect these movies to be availible to them in China in EVD format, and thats exactly what they're going to get.
See the problem with this India Shining thing is that you still have over half a billion people who are poverty stricken. The last time I was in Delhi (addmitidly about ten years ago) I saw homeless people everywhere. The sidewalks were crammed with people who didn't have anything to eat, or any place to live. I'm sure things have come along since then, but India's middle class is still less than 200 million people. With a population of one billion people, this still leaves a lot of people under the poverty line.
I'm Pakistani, so I've seen the plight of the urban and rural masses. As much as developing countries catch up to the west, a majority of their population still lives in poverty. Untill this issue can be addressed, I think everyone should keep their ego under controll.
Here is another situation to consider. I am currently in the process of setting up a call center. My focus is going to be on ISP backoffice operations since I already own and operate and ISP. Now when in hire people for the call center, I will be paing them many multiples more than a regular support officer would get here. Infact, they will be getting approximately the same salary that an assistant sys admin, or in some cases even a sys admin, would get. Due to this I will be able to hire people with undergraduate degrees in CS and two or three years of experiance in networking. These will be highly qualified people that will be providing mundane customer support. Do you think these guys are more equipped to deal with ordinary customer problems or some American that got one week of training with no conceptual knowledge of what he's providing support for.
See, this is the reason you people are loosing your jobs. Its not just that you can get cheaper labour outside the US. You can also get more qualified and experianced people.
Well, the question is why should a call center spend a substantial amount of additional money to hire more trained personell and/or provide additional trining when their existing customer support team can handle 99% of user problems. I don't think international call centers are the problem here. Companies that our outsourcing their support should provide a mechanism whereby calls can be transffered to more qualified support personell if the problem can't be addressed by the primary support team.
I seriously doubt that local American customer support is any better than support provided by offshore call centers. Over here, you get highly educated intelligent people for the kind of salaries that call centers offer. In America, you might end up talking to some part time high school reject. So I really don't see how these snide remarks about people with Indian accents are relevant. They are probably more educated than your typical American support person.
As I said before, it is up to the vendor of the product to spend money on a system where calls by more competant consumers can be addressed by higher level tech support. This can be American tech support, or higher level tech support that they pay their offshore call center to provide.
But really, enough with the racism.
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She wasn't just born in Italy, she's Italian by birth.
Low internet rates can be attributed to fierce competition in the ISP market. Many ISP's are having to sell bandwidth at a loss, just to try to cover their operating cost. The internet cafe business is also highly competitive. Since a large number of people cant afford computers at home, they generally turn to internet cafes for access. As a result, the country has seen an explosion in the number of net cafes in recent years (Porn has also been a very prominent driving force in the growth of net cafes)
There is currently a campaign underway to try to preassurize the new minister of Science and Technology to reduce bandwidth costs substantially. If this happens, there will be a drastic drop in internet cafe access charges.
I'm currently running an ISP in Pakisan. Your perception of the role of government subsidies is inaccurate. Bandwidth is currently provided throughout Pakistan primarily by PTCL (Pakistan Telecom), which untill very recently was a protected monopoly. They are currently selling ISP's bandwidth for about 12 times the cost of their international circuit. We pay $6000/Mb, whereas their cost is somewhere in the region of 400-500 dollars. So if anything, we are getting ripped of royally.
Low internet rates can be attributed to fierce competition in the ISP market. Many ISP's are having to sell bandwidth at a loss, just to try to cover their operating cost. The internet cafe business is also highly competitive. Since a large number of people cant afford computers at home, they generally turn to internet cafes for access. As a result, the country has seen an explosion in the number of net cafes in recent years (Porn has also been a very prominent driving force in the growth of net cafes)
There is currently a campaign underway to try to preassurize the new minister of Science and Technology to reduce bandwidth costs substantially. If this happens, there will be a drastic drop in internet cafe access charges.
Try to read my message properly before responding. 1) I did not call Germans racist, I called the poster racist. This is evident from him calling India a shabby country. 2) I did not say that the company undermined the Indians work (after all, as you said, they hired them). I said that the the Poster and his German collegues probably undermined the effor of the Indians there, wasting company resources in the process. 3) My evidence is based on the posters use of words like "shabby" to classify an entire country. If not racist, how should I categorize the use of this word. Perhaps hateful or ignorant would be more accurate. You think my attitude is "narrow-minded". Perhaps not as narrow minded as judgeing an entire country based on limited experiance with a couple of its nationals.
After reading your comment, I have a feeling that the problem wasn't with the Indians, but rather you and your German collegues. With the sort of racist attitude you have exhibited about India, I have no doubt that you must have tried you best to undermine any work the Indians did. Without support from their supposed collegues, they couldn't possibly have been expected to perform at their optimal level. You are truly a worthless individual. I can only imagine that most germans would be embarassed to be associated with you.
Oh really. Have you ever heard the saying, practice before you fucking preach (ok, I added the fucking).
In this case I believe that MS may have a bit of a fight on their hands. There primary competition is Apple (iTMS), which already has quite a stranglehold on digital music. They already have a deal with HP which puts and iTMS icon on the desktop of every machine that HP sells. This means that a large number of PC's that are sold will come bundeled with Apples software. Apart from this, the iPod has become quite a status symbol. It will take much more than just a device with better WMP integration to dethrone it. Most of the people that buy iPods do so becuase of the cool hypster image that it possesses. These are not tech savy people, and probably wont even notice that their iPod is not compatible with WMP (or at least, wont care). All iPods come with a CD that contains iTMS. Since iTunes is necessary to synch with the iPod, it will be installed on every iPod owners PC. When you add iPod, Apple, and HP owners, you have accounted for a substantial percentage of the population that is interested in legal digital music downloads. If the popularity of the iPod continues to rise, it will just make the competition tougher for MS. This may well be a case where MS will have to find a way to infiltrate Apples market, rather than the other way around. However, the playing field is completely different than it was during the browser wars.
Well, the only advantage that OO has is that its free. Nobody gives a fuck if its open source or supports XML (except geeks). Most people couldn't give a shit about open source, and they are completely fine with proprietary file formats like .doc or .ppt. As far as the improving feature set is concerned, it is merely trying to catch up to what MS Office already does.
EIOffice does introduce a new approach to integration betweeen office applications. This is more than I can say about OO.
As far as the other technolgies, I think the EVD standard is doomed to failure. People are going to want DVDs from abroad, and a player that only does EVD isn't going to sell.
No, actually they're going to want to buy foreign movies. They'll expect these movies to be availible to them in China in EVD format, and thats exactly what they're going to get.
[quote]As far as the other technolgies, I think the EVD standard is doomed to failure. People are going to want DVDs from abroad, and a player that only does EVD isn't going to sell. [/quote]
No, actually they're going to want to buy foreign movies. They'll expect these movies to be availible to them in China in EVD format, and thats exactly what they're going to get.
See the problem with this India Shining thing is that you still have over half a billion people who are poverty stricken. The last time I was in Delhi (addmitidly about ten years ago) I saw homeless people everywhere. The sidewalks were crammed with people who didn't have anything to eat, or any place to live. I'm sure things have come along since then, but India's middle class is still less than 200 million people. With a population of one billion people, this still leaves a lot of people under the poverty line. I'm Pakistani, so I've seen the plight of the urban and rural masses. As much as developing countries catch up to the west, a majority of their population still lives in poverty. Untill this issue can be addressed, I think everyone should keep their ego under controll.
Here is another situation to consider. I am currently in the process of setting up a call center. My focus is going to be on ISP backoffice operations since I already own and operate and ISP. Now when in hire people for the call center, I will be paing them many multiples more than a regular support officer would get here. Infact, they will be getting approximately the same salary that an assistant sys admin, or in some cases even a sys admin, would get. Due to this I will be able to hire people with undergraduate degrees in CS and two or three years of experiance in networking. These will be highly qualified people that will be providing mundane customer support. Do you think these guys are more equipped to deal with ordinary customer problems or some American that got one week of training with no conceptual knowledge of what he's providing support for.
See, this is the reason you people are loosing your jobs. Its not just that you can get cheaper labour outside the US. You can also get more qualified and experianced people.
I have some glaring spelling gramatical mistakes in above post. "Our" should have been spelled "Are".
Well, the question is why should a call center spend a substantial amount of additional money to hire more trained personell and/or provide additional trining when their existing customer support team can handle 99% of user problems. I don't think international call centers are the problem here. Companies that our outsourcing their support should provide a mechanism whereby calls can be transffered to more qualified support personell if the problem can't be addressed by the primary support team. I seriously doubt that local American customer support is any better than support provided by offshore call centers. Over here, you get highly educated intelligent people for the kind of salaries that call centers offer. In America, you might end up talking to some part time high school reject. So I really don't see how these snide remarks about people with Indian accents are relevant. They are probably more educated than your typical American support person. As I said before, it is up to the vendor of the product to spend money on a system where calls by more competant consumers can be addressed by higher level tech support. This can be American tech support, or higher level tech support that they pay their offshore call center to provide. But really, enough with the racism.