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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | RE: [gislist] Indian GIS usage |
| Date: |
12/23/2003 07:25:00 AM |
| From: |
Mike |
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You made some excellent points Anthony. Yes I agree that in order to
understand what is happing in GIS we have to understand the overall context
that it exists in. I would like to add a few things to some of the points
you made.
I recently was looking at some business studies about the effects of
Wal-Mart on suppliers and was surprised by the fact that people will
"consumerspenderize" them selves right out of a job. The case in point was
Master Lock which had a factory in Michigan. The people who worked at the
factory when they needed a padlock would go to Wal-Mart and buy a similar
one from China that sold for 3 dollars less. Of course, the factory was
moved to Mexico so Master Lock could stay in business and, the factory
workers were forced to move on to other careers. I would suggest that going
with the cheapest price in spite of the long term consequences is not unique
to just the corporate world but is a basic law of economics all consumers in
a free market are subject too - including Indian GIS companies.
This brings me to another point. Again, to add to your excellent comments, I
am starting to understand the difficulties of developing a solid GIS
industry in India. In particular, the problem that as India's IT industry
becomes more successful, it in fact becomes less sustainable. One of the
problems with living in the U.S. is we tend to paint everything in terms of
U.S. markets and "others." India's IT market isn't just competing with U.S.
companies, it is competing with every company that supplies GIS or IT
services. If Indian companies become too successful, they will price
themselves out of the market just like so many U.S. IT companies do to firms
in China or other places. (Did you know that Mexico lost 30,000 factory jobs
to China last year) Thanks Anthony for pointing that out. Now it makes sense
why an Indian company would advertise as costing five times less then a U.S.
company. If they didn't come in that cheap, some other company in
Bangladesh, Viet Nam, or the Congo would.
Understanding this sort of world that GIS exists in brings back the nagging
question of can something like IT in general and GIS in particular be
transported across cultural and language boundaries. What parts of GIS are
commodity items that can be done anywhere in the world and what parts must
be done by IT/GIS workers in the culture where the end users of the GIS
information exist? Are GIS technicians computer programmers that know
something about cartography, or are they cartographers that know a bit about
programming? How can companies in places like the U.S. compete with
companies in places like India? Or are they even in the same type of
business where they have to compete (commodity verses value added)?
Again, thanks Anthony for your comments. I always value ideas and opinions
that lead to more questions than answers.
-----Original Message-----
From: gislist-bounces@lists.geocomm.com
[mailto:gislist-bounces@lists.geocomm.com] On Behalf Of Anthony Quartararo
Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2003 4:44 AM
To: gislist@lists.thinkburst.com
Subject: RE: [gislist] Indian GIS usage
These comments bring up some points that are relevant to the thread:
1) The Indian IT community is very much the same as Wal-Mart vs. Target vs.
?, that is, they realize that consumers will jump to another store to save
$.25 on a similar item. As long as there is a surplus of talent, that
talent is a commodity, and as with all commodities, it becomes increasingly
difficult to discriminate differences in value ( = quality+price+schedule
per unit), and so all things being equal, if Consultant A offers a 1.5X
discount and Consultant B offers 1.55X discount, the decision is almost
always a financial one.
2) The fact that Wipro, TCS, Infotech, RMSI, L&T, and other notable IT(GIS)
companies in India have gradually increased their prices demonstrates that
they are a) experiencing increasing internal costs, b) realizing the point
made below that they need not offer steep discounts for every client, c)
making an effort to step out of the traditional role of subcontractor to one
of prime contractor, d) their respective GIS units are being required to
contribute more % return to the corporate mothership*, e) all of the above
or f) none of the above if there is some mystery left undiscovered.
* Indian GIS companies frequently are one small component of larger
conglomerates, the "everything the everyone" model, and while they
contribute .000X% to the total corporate bottom line, they mindset is
something like, "we cannot afford not to participate in the GIS industry..."
3) India is not China. Similar sizes in population do not equate to similar
potentiality of markets. It is only very, very recently that the Indian
middle-class (economically speaking) has started to realize its leverage.
China's has had
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