What you say is probably true. I was trying to be funny, but was not very good at it.:-(
What drove MS's success was all businesses insisting on "compatibility". The older generation of management was slow in grasping the full costs of vendor lock-in into a standard that is proprietary, closed and owned by a commercial entity. But the newer generation of IT managers are atleast aware of the term. Software is costing a lot more than hardware now a days. So the real threat to MS is someone with the credibility and muscle of Google showing what can be done with something so simple as a browser as the platform. Even if suddenly the IT managers of corporations become as smart as slashdotters overnight, MS will continue to make tons of money for a long long time.
Everyone seems to have missed the real point about Writely. Google understands that MS still has the "DOS is not done till DR-DOS wont run" mentality. So every product Google releases delays Longhorn! MS has to make sure IE7 and Longhorn breaks that service, without breaking IIS5 based ASPX websites too much.
Just when Redmond goes, "Google maps, broken, check", "Gmail, broken, check", "Gdesktop, broken, check".... "OK Longhorn is ready to ship". Suddenly urgent messenger comes galloping in, shouting , "hold your horses, we cant ship Longhorn till we break Writely".
Difraction is very much different from filtering. If you shine light [*1] at a grating [*2] the light coming out on the other side "fans out" each frequency coming out at a different angle. It is so long since my freshman physics lab. But there we shone the yellow sodium vapor lamp light at a grating and it "bent" the light and the output came at 2 O' Clock position instead of going straight. Each frequency will come out at a different angle.
[*1] Polarized collimated coherant light.
[*2] Grating is a series of dark lines etched on a transparent glass piece. Sort of a venetian blind with very large number of very narrow strips.
If you change the attributes, the very defining characteristics of something, and you have to rename it? Wow! What a concept. Then I wonder what would be an appropriate name for the Republican Party!
Expecting the traffic to a site to increase in direct proportion to the number of inbound links is completely stupid. Let us say, for example, my site gets one inbound link from google.com main page. I will get some traffic. Then I get another inbound link from the home page of IIT-M Alumni Association of Allegheny Valley. Now with two links to my page, you think I should get twice the traffic? How stupid is that? All sites dont have equal traffic. Unless you weight the inbound links with popularity of originating sites, it is a meaningless exercise.
Further the search engines themselves allot page rank by the number of inbound links and the keywords found in the "a" tag of originating pages. So more inbound links will raise your page rank, get you ahead in the search listings and get you more traffic. But the traffic will be counted as a "search engine" generated traffic not as traffic originating from a referring site. With this much of interdependance between page rank and the number of inbound links how did the study control for it?
The number of inbound links is already reflected in the search engine generated traffic, or to use Wall Street parlance, it is fully discounted. There is nothing to see here. Move On.
Never liked TiVo's monthly subscriptions. Heard that they collect data and phone home. Further techies were saying that they can disable the machine, add/remove functionality in the future. I really dont care much for most of what TiVo is selling. I dont need program guide and such stuff. All I really want is simply catch-up playback and random instant access to previously recorded programs.
Nor did I buy Dish PVR because, again monthly subscriptions. I think I should grab one of these Phillips DVRs while it is still on the shelves. Would TiVO go after these companies too?
Small nit to pick. You missed a crucial & at the end of the commands. The ampersand will detach the job and return control to the shell.
Without it, mplayer will begin only after the earlier cat command(s) finish. And since/dev/video0 does not have a control_D in its stream they will never finish.
Or are you using a shell where all jobs go to the background, like they do in (gasp...) windows?
Yes, one can just code up a page, view it in a browser, if it seems correct, assume the code is right and move on. Why bother about compliance with standards or correctness of code? My eye ball is enough. And if you follow this logic you would code to render correctly on IE.
But you are not looking at your own "switching costs". What is the pricing power of any company selling anything? Typically a company cant sell something below cost and expect to thrive for long. That is the lower limit. What is the upper limit? That is determined by how much would it cost its clients to switch to a competing product.
For things like car tires and electric bulbs, the cost for a consumer to switch to a competing brand is practically zero and the price is determined by the cost of manufacturing, storing, distributing and the profit margins. Very traditional, old school economics.
For software, the cost of production is quite low especially when it is amortized over hundreds of millions of users. It is almost entirely determined by switching costs. If it will cost you 1 million dollars to switch out of company Xyz's product, Xyz can charge you 999,999$ and you will pay. If you are a smart businessman, you will strive hard to reduce your switching costs. Lower it is for you, lower will be your exposure to price gounging by your software vendors. Any time you develop a dependancy on a single vendor you are at that vendor's mercy.
Coming back to electric bulbs and car tires, how come the cost of switching to competing brand is so low? Precisely because of standards and standard compliance. SAE determines the dimensions and specifications of tires, not Firestone, Goodyear or Cooper or Yokohama. That is why switching costs are low. As long as MS "owns" the standards, you are at its mercy. You might not care about it. But be glad there are people who think far ahead.
One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure.
This is the key folks. So many corporate database products rely on IE as the rendering engine. If the backward compatibility is lost, most corporations' will see their Crystal Reports, and other SQL engines that use IE as their GUI/renderers will be broken. They will never allow that to happen. So they will sacrifice the standard compliance.
Of course they will claim their concern is the "not spoiling the user experience" of their old moms or breaking millions of websites. But the real concern is that all these products should continue to use IE as their rendering engine. Their hold on corporate desktops through MS-Office and IE is too dear and profitable for them to compromise.
Just pry it loose. (Remember to keep the pried open key in your desk along with the mug holding paper clips and pencils so that when the corporate bean counters come doing their inventory check you could show it to them.)
IMNAWAD (Web App Developer). But when I words like "Seamless deploy and install" promoted by the folks who brought you the Browser Helper Objects, I am worried. I dont know what this SOAP washes but I assume RPC is remote procedure call.
I assume you are real legit on the up-and-up developer hawking some legitimate service/software over the net. If the world is made up exclusively of people like that we dont need to worry about minor head aches like security, trust, hostile environment etc. But you know, there are bad people out there, and it takes a very small number of them to gum up the works, to make a mess for everyone.
"Why constrain ourselves to the browser?"
No anti-virus/security company is going to recommend to their clients to shut off the browser. (Well, I wish they would advice their clients to shut off IE, but that aint gonna happen either.) But some virus/worm attack happens and they advice the users to shut off a critical part of SOAP/RPC/.Net/Forms or whatever the hell is putting food on your table.
Yes, Profs dont make peanuts and some profs make tons of money. And they have convinced the universities and other research institutes to fund their tenure. Some of their research is top class and some are completely useless. But the main thing is that these academics have traded a part (may be a small part) of what they would have earned in private sector to name recognition and publications and citations in peer reviewed journals. Prestige is the coin in their realm.
Why cant/wont/shouldnt the newly minted millionaires from the software fields and high tech fields endow institutes whose charter would be to maintain and enhance Open Source/Freely (as in speech) Licensed software? These software institutes might not pay their programmers as much as google or microsoft, but their code would be openly published and dissected and reviewed and discussed. People who produced high quality code would be highly regarded in their community and this prestige might attract some really good talent.
I think promoting Open Standards, interoperability, preventing vendor lock-ins etc are greater service to humanity and funding research about "mindset of middle aged men with a penchant for sailing".
When it comes to research, be it physics or chemistry or chemical engineering or fluid mechanics or medicine, there are kinds of people doing it. Vast majority of them are working for commercial companies and their work is owned by private corporations. But there is a significant number of them working for academic institutions, and their pay is low compared to their private sector counterparts but they work for the prestige they get by publishing their research and being recognized as leading researchers. They also have the freedom to do the research in areas they are interested in. The private sector scientists mostly work in areas their employers are interested in.
Likewise, there should be a significant number of programmers, hackers, coders, software professionals who would rather work in areas of their choice and work for the name recognition, and who would be willing to work for lower pay. If the Open Source community is organized or reorganized in the academic research model it would benefit all. Would it happen? I have no idea.
Well, In almost all companies and most homes the ports 137-139 and 445 are blocked at the firewall. But internally these ports are open otherwise file sharing/printer sharing inside the network is impossible. True, it wont be serious as long as the firewall holds. But all it takes is one home user bringing an infected laptop to work and plug it in and all hell breaks loose. I had an old NT4.0 machine just to support old releases of our product and for debugging. A salesman from Taiwan came in plugged his laptop in and I was hosed. Worse, the worm was probing rest of the corporate network so seriously that network traffic slowed to crawl in the company. All the top management knew was that I had an unpatched old computer in the network and compromised the company intranet and lost half their work day.
How easy it is to bring an infected laptop and plug it in behind the firewall? Our salesmen travel all over the world, plug into untold number of hotel intranets and wi-fi cafes. They leave these two ports open when plugged into company intranet. Do they always remember to close these ports when they work in an untrustable network connection? Chances of infection are great. Chances of them bringing the infection behind the firewall into the corporate network is great. I would not hastily dismiss it nonchalantly.
Cray computers has failed miserably in the marketplace. The solutions it produces is completely out of whack with the cost of solving the problem. This 52 million bucks is just welfare for PhDs in Computational Fluid Dynamics, Computational Electromagnetics, etc. People building ivory towers in the skies with their heads in clouds...
America would be better served if we sink the money in creating interoperability standards and creates ways to increase competition in the computational industries. Every company from Microsoft, to Apple to Parametric Techologies to SDRC to Oracle to ANSYS to itsy-bitsy-prof-and-grad-student-garage startups work to build vendor lock-in into every one of their products. The market creates rich rewards for locking in the user to one software product and preventing the user from migrating to a more efficient competitor.
Promote interop and competition. Super computers will become dime a dozen.
Remember, the ad campaign by Redmond "Get The Facts"? It hired a friendly outsider to do some Total Cost of Ownership and concluded that "being vendor locked into Microsoft and paying all the license fees, tribute, bounty, ransom, blackmail and whitemail [*] it demands now and in the future is the most economical thing for all corporations, irrespective of size, to do"?
I wonder if that study included all these costs associated with these critical security upgrades too.
[*] Some trivia for the curious: Whitemail is the tax paid by serfs to their lords in silver coins. Blackmail is tax collected in the form of goods.
In this site search for firefox you get 17 hits. Search for internet explorer you get 1650 hits. IE wins 100 to 1 over Firefox! But this is AOLcrowd, what else would you expect? I am really surprised there is one aoler who actually tried to find the comparison between IE7 and FireFox!!
This site is a treasure trove. Let me play with it a little more. Republicans, Democrats, Evolution, Intelligent Design, so many comparisons to make, so little time!
I think the spammers just bungled. They forgot to include the spammy payload. And some bug did not add the tags to make the text white-on-white with zero points or one points in height. They think these non spammy words will get them past to deliver a payload some inbox.
Even the professionals coding up Firefox and MS-Office and iMovie are known to have written codes with a few bugs in them. What makes you think these inexplicable non spammy spam is anything more than a hiccup by the script monkeys?
Well, the word "hack" and "hacker" originates from the hardware side of things. Rewiring circuits and fiddling with non standard ideas to get some circuit to work etc. Software hacking is really a latecomer, and what he did qualifies to be called "hacking".
Usually the word volatile is used describe liquids and methane is a gas at normal temp and pressure.
Anyway methane(CH4) is odourless. Almost all the livestock odours come from Hydrogen Sulfide H2S and Ammonia NH3. Infact natural gas is methane. It has no natural smell. They add a very highly stinking compound to the gas to make it detectable. Since methane/CH4/NG/CNG are gases they are always stored, sold and used from sealed containers and you get much less chance to smell them.
Getting fuel out of farm waste benefits all.
1. The farm waste is contained to capture methane, that also captures H2S and Ammonia thus reducing stink for the neighbourhood.
2. Captured methane originally came from the atmosphere, so it does not add any extra green house gases to the atmospher. When it is burnt the carbon in CH4 is released as CO2 from the tail pipes, which is 100 times better for the atmosphere than releasing all that unburnt methane into the atmosphere like we are doing now.
3. After extracting the combustible compounds from the farm waste, what is left behind is high quality organic fertilizer.
4. USA has 100 million cows and about 200 million pigs. The methane released from their excreta can cut our oil imports by 15 to 25%. Saudi Arabia will be begging us to buy their oil at 10$ a barrel if we alter the supply/demand equation by 25%.
The only downside is that we have to go through a phase where we have to endure sophomoric jokes about cow farts from every newscaster in this country.
No new tech breakthroughs are needed. The basic technology is more than 30 years old. What is needed is making it economically viable. As oil price goes up, they will become viable. It is just a matter of time.
Ethanol, as it is currently produced using intensive agriculture, petroleum derived fertilizer and insecticides, is completely unviable. But there are other bio fuels that are much more viable.
Straight vegetable oil derived from wild plants that grow like weeds, that are innately resistant to pests, and drought tolerant are more viable. In India the IISc and IITs are reseraching on plants like jatropha. Indian Railways has
a locomotive running on it. SVO is not viable for cold climate and it will need elasticizers to convert it into bio-diesel.
Methane derived from dairy farm waste can replace 15% of the crude oil imports and provide organiz fertilizers on the side.
I think some day we will have "artificial cow stomachs" that will accept all kinds of weeds and grasses in industrial scale as input, grind them, and use microbes to break down the cellulose and release methane.
Ethanol? It is a great fuel for politicians whoring for votes in corn belt and venture capitalists hyping up their investments before unloading them. Not for cars and homes. Just my humble opinion.
India is a democracy. It is no doubt corrupt, moribund and frankly crappy. Its politicians are populists and unabashed and unrepentant socialists and communists. And populism, socialism and communism finds lots of support in its population. But nevertheless it is a democracy. That is why the dynamics is unfolding the way it is.
Once upon a time, well educated smart English speaking Indians were working for chickenfeed or less. When the cost of telecommunications fell low, they became viable competitors to some white collar workers in Europe and West. High quality workers willing to work for low pay. Companies flocked and outsourcing boomed.
But though India has a billion people, not all of them are spelling bees, jeopardy champions and IIT graduates rolled into one. The average Indian is just semi literate. Demand outstripped the supply of high quality workers and now they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel. The salaries, the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure increased and is increasing. The quality of the work fell and is falling. All in all, outsourcing is not economical anymore. Not that all these Indians are going to be laid off. The well educated and qualified ones would keep their jobs but the insane levels of out sourcing will slow down.
Contrast it with what is going in China. It has been running a trade surplus for two full decades. India still does not have a trade surplus. (It has against US but overall it does not.) The factory output of China has been increasing at the rapid pace of 10% per year for 20 years. If it is a democracy, the yuan would have appreciated by a factor of 10 atleast and the salary of the workers would have increased by a factor of 10 and they would not have been able to undercut US/European/Japanese factories. Even if their salary is low, couple it with transportation costs, and the low productivity of a chinese workers, they could not compete with US. Despite all the advantages China has today, there is still some manufacturing going on in USA and it is able to compete. Though barely. With a freer economy and democracy in China, we will not have this kind of imbalance in trade with China.
A badly implemented Democracy, like it is in India, is any day better for both India and US than the oppressive totalitarian governement of the few self selected leaders of China.
The smart thing for American blue collar workers to do would be to fight for the welfare of the Chinese workers. They should not be seen as "someone who stole our jobs" and our attitude should not be, "let those job stealers rot". If the working conditions and salary of the Chinese workers rise, it is a good thing for us. May be we can sell them some things and may we can compete with them. But with the present system of the Chinese Communist Party selling the blood and sweat of its citizens at throwaway prices, it hurts us, the ordinary Chinese citizens, every one except those party leaders and CEOs of our companies.
Just my two cents.
Slashdot Mirror
What drove MS's success was all businesses insisting on "compatibility". The older generation of management was slow in grasping the full costs of vendor lock-in into a standard that is proprietary, closed and owned by a commercial entity. But the newer generation of IT managers are atleast aware of the term. Software is costing a lot more than hardware now a days. So the real threat to MS is someone with the credibility and muscle of Google showing what can be done with something so simple as a browser as the platform. Even if suddenly the IT managers of corporations become as smart as slashdotters overnight, MS will continue to make tons of money for a long long time.
Just when Redmond goes, "Google maps, broken, check", "Gmail, broken, check", "Gdesktop, broken, check" .... "OK Longhorn is ready to ship". Suddenly urgent messenger comes galloping in, shouting , "hold your horses, we cant ship Longhorn till we break Writely".
[*1] Polarized collimated coherant light.
[*2] Grating is a series of dark lines etched on a transparent glass piece. Sort of a venetian blind with very large number of very narrow strips.
If you change the attributes, the very defining characteristics of something, and you have to rename it? Wow! What a concept. Then I wonder what would be an appropriate name for the Republican Party!
Further the search engines themselves allot page rank by the number of inbound links and the keywords found in the "a" tag of originating pages. So more inbound links will raise your page rank, get you ahead in the search listings and get you more traffic. But the traffic will be counted as a "search engine" generated traffic not as traffic originating from a referring site. With this much of interdependance between page rank and the number of inbound links how did the study control for it?
The number of inbound links is already reflected in the search engine generated traffic, or to use Wall Street parlance, it is fully discounted. There is nothing to see here. Move On.
Nor did I buy Dish PVR because, again monthly subscriptions. I think I should grab one of these Phillips DVRs while it is still on the shelves. Would TiVO go after these companies too?
Without it, mplayer will begin only after the earlier cat command(s) finish. And since /dev/video0 does not have a control_D in its stream they will never finish.
Or are you using a shell where all jobs go to the background, like they do in (gasp...) windows?
But you are not looking at your own "switching costs". What is the pricing power of any company selling anything? Typically a company cant sell something below cost and expect to thrive for long. That is the lower limit. What is the upper limit? That is determined by how much would it cost its clients to switch to a competing product.
For things like car tires and electric bulbs, the cost for a consumer to switch to a competing brand is practically zero and the price is determined by the cost of manufacturing, storing, distributing and the profit margins. Very traditional, old school economics.
For software, the cost of production is quite low especially when it is amortized over hundreds of millions of users. It is almost entirely determined by switching costs. If it will cost you 1 million dollars to switch out of company Xyz's product, Xyz can charge you 999,999$ and you will pay. If you are a smart businessman, you will strive hard to reduce your switching costs. Lower it is for you, lower will be your exposure to price gounging by your software vendors. Any time you develop a dependancy on a single vendor you are at that vendor's mercy.
Coming back to electric bulbs and car tires, how come the cost of switching to competing brand is so low? Precisely because of standards and standard compliance. SAE determines the dimensions and specifications of tires, not Firestone, Goodyear or Cooper or Yokohama. That is why switching costs are low. As long as MS "owns" the standards, you are at its mercy. You might not care about it. But be glad there are people who think far ahead.
This is the key folks. So many corporate database products rely on IE as the rendering engine. If the backward compatibility is lost, most corporations' will see their Crystal Reports, and other SQL engines that use IE as their GUI/renderers will be broken. They will never allow that to happen. So they will sacrifice the standard compliance.
Of course they will claim their concern is the "not spoiling the user experience" of their old moms or breaking millions of websites. But the real concern is that all these products should continue to use IE as their rendering engine. Their hold on corporate desktops through MS-Office and IE is too dear and profitable for them to compromise.
Just pry it loose. (Remember to keep the pried open key in your desk along with the mug holding paper clips and pencils so that when the corporate bean counters come doing their inventory check you could show it to them.)
I assume you are real legit on the up-and-up developer hawking some legitimate service/software over the net. If the world is made up exclusively of people like that we dont need to worry about minor head aches like security, trust, hostile environment etc. But you know, there are bad people out there, and it takes a very small number of them to gum up the works, to make a mess for everyone.
"Why constrain ourselves to the browser?"
No anti-virus/security company is going to recommend to their clients to shut off the browser. (Well, I wish they would advice their clients to shut off IE, but that aint gonna happen either.) But some virus/worm attack happens and they advice the users to shut off a critical part of SOAP/RPC/.Net/Forms or whatever the hell is putting food on your table.
Hope this story does not create a sudden rush of vistitors to slashdot, so many so that the site goes down and create a name for that phenomenon ;-)
Why cant/wont/shouldnt the newly minted millionaires from the software fields and high tech fields endow institutes whose charter would be to maintain and enhance Open Source/Freely (as in speech) Licensed software? These software institutes might not pay their programmers as much as google or microsoft, but their code would be openly published and dissected and reviewed and discussed. People who produced high quality code would be highly regarded in their community and this prestige might attract some really good talent.
I think promoting Open Standards, interoperability, preventing vendor lock-ins etc are greater service to humanity and funding research about "mindset of middle aged men with a penchant for sailing".
Likewise, there should be a significant number of programmers, hackers, coders, software professionals who would rather work in areas of their choice and work for the name recognition, and who would be willing to work for lower pay. If the Open Source community is organized or reorganized in the academic research model it would benefit all. Would it happen? I have no idea.
How easy it is to bring an infected laptop and plug it in behind the firewall? Our salesmen travel all over the world, plug into untold number of hotel intranets and wi-fi cafes. They leave these two ports open when plugged into company intranet. Do they always remember to close these ports when they work in an untrustable network connection? Chances of infection are great. Chances of them bringing the infection behind the firewall into the corporate network is great. I would not hastily dismiss it nonchalantly.
America would be better served if we sink the money in creating interoperability standards and creates ways to increase competition in the computational industries. Every company from Microsoft, to Apple to Parametric Techologies to SDRC to Oracle to ANSYS to itsy-bitsy-prof-and-grad-student-garage startups work to build vendor lock-in into every one of their products. The market creates rich rewards for locking in the user to one software product and preventing the user from migrating to a more efficient competitor.
Promote interop and competition. Super computers will become dime a dozen.
I wonder if that study included all these costs associated with these critical security upgrades too.
[*] Some trivia for the curious: Whitemail is the tax paid by serfs to their lords in silver coins. Blackmail is tax collected in the form of goods.
In this site some more scores: Democrats: 8 hits Republicans 5. Evolution: 47 Bible 326. Constitution: 22. Jesus: 82 Vishnu: 0 What does it all mean?
This site is a treasure trove. Let me play with it a little more. Republicans, Democrats, Evolution, Intelligent Design, so many comparisons to make, so little time!
Even the professionals coding up Firefox and MS-Office and iMovie are known to have written codes with a few bugs in them. What makes you think these inexplicable non spammy spam is anything more than a hiccup by the script monkeys?
Well, the word "hack" and "hacker" originates from the hardware side of things. Rewiring circuits and fiddling with non standard ideas to get some circuit to work etc. Software hacking is really a latecomer, and what he did qualifies to be called "hacking".
Anyway methane(CH4) is odourless. Almost all the livestock odours come from Hydrogen Sulfide H2S and Ammonia NH3. Infact natural gas is methane. It has no natural smell. They add a very highly stinking compound to the gas to make it detectable. Since methane/CH4/NG/CNG are gases they are always stored, sold and used from sealed containers and you get much less chance to smell them.
Getting fuel out of farm waste benefits all.
1. The farm waste is contained to capture methane, that also captures H2S and Ammonia thus reducing stink for the neighbourhood.
2. Captured methane originally came from the atmosphere, so it does not add any extra green house gases to the atmospher. When it is burnt the carbon in CH4 is released as CO2 from the tail pipes, which is 100 times better for the atmosphere than releasing all that unburnt methane into the atmosphere like we are doing now.
3. After extracting the combustible compounds from the farm waste, what is left behind is high quality organic fertilizer.
4. USA has 100 million cows and about 200 million pigs. The methane released from their excreta can cut our oil imports by 15 to 25%. Saudi Arabia will be begging us to buy their oil at 10$ a barrel if we alter the supply/demand equation by 25%.
The only downside is that we have to go through a phase where we have to endure sophomoric jokes about cow farts from every newscaster in this country.
No new tech breakthroughs are needed. The basic technology is more than 30 years old. What is needed is making it economically viable. As oil price goes up, they will become viable. It is just a matter of time.
Straight vegetable oil derived from wild plants that grow like weeds, that are innately resistant to pests, and drought tolerant are more viable. In India the IISc and IITs are reseraching on plants like jatropha. Indian Railways has a locomotive running on it. SVO is not viable for cold climate and it will need elasticizers to convert it into bio-diesel.
Methane derived from dairy farm waste can replace 15% of the crude oil imports and provide organiz fertilizers on the side.
I think some day we will have "artificial cow stomachs" that will accept all kinds of weeds and grasses in industrial scale as input, grind them, and use microbes to break down the cellulose and release methane.
Ethanol? It is a great fuel for politicians whoring for votes in corn belt and venture capitalists hyping up their investments before unloading them. Not for cars and homes. Just my humble opinion.
Once upon a time, well educated smart English speaking Indians were working for chickenfeed or less. When the cost of telecommunications fell low, they became viable competitors to some white collar workers in Europe and West. High quality workers willing to work for low pay. Companies flocked and outsourcing boomed.
But though India has a billion people, not all of them are spelling bees, jeopardy champions and IIT graduates rolled into one. The average Indian is just semi literate. Demand outstripped the supply of high quality workers and now they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel. The salaries, the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure increased and is increasing. The quality of the work fell and is falling. All in all, outsourcing is not economical anymore. Not that all these Indians are going to be laid off. The well educated and qualified ones would keep their jobs but the insane levels of out sourcing will slow down.
Contrast it with what is going in China. It has been running a trade surplus for two full decades. India still does not have a trade surplus. (It has against US but overall it does not.) The factory output of China has been increasing at the rapid pace of 10% per year for 20 years. If it is a democracy, the yuan would have appreciated by a factor of 10 atleast and the salary of the workers would have increased by a factor of 10 and they would not have been able to undercut US/European/Japanese factories. Even if their salary is low, couple it with transportation costs, and the low productivity of a chinese workers, they could not compete with US. Despite all the advantages China has today, there is still some manufacturing going on in USA and it is able to compete. Though barely. With a freer economy and democracy in China, we will not have this kind of imbalance in trade with China.
A badly implemented Democracy, like it is in India, is any day better for both India and US than the oppressive totalitarian governement of the few self selected leaders of China.
The smart thing for American blue collar workers to do would be to fight for the welfare of the Chinese workers. They should not be seen as "someone who stole our jobs" and our attitude should not be, "let those job stealers rot". If the working conditions and salary of the Chinese workers rise, it is a good thing for us. May be we can sell them some things and may we can compete with them. But with the present system of the Chinese Communist Party selling the blood and sweat of its citizens at throwaway prices, it hurts us, the ordinary Chinese citizens, every one except those party leaders and CEOs of our companies. Just my two cents.