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| Subject: | RE: [gislist] Outsourcing GIS |
| Date: |
12/25/2003 08:15:00 AM |
| From: |
Mike |
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Congratulation Dimitri on your daughters success. She sounds like a young
person we all can be proud of.
I need to apologize for making my point so poorly. I was not suggesting that
one set of standards be applied to companies in one country and a different
set of standard ad be set for companies else where. I am suggesting that all
companies need to have access to a fair and impartial court system the
interprets well thought out laws enacted by a democratically elected
government so they can effectively resolve problems in business contract law
and access to markets. For me, that is one of cornerstones to the economic
success in the United States and something that U.S. business may take for
granted and find not to be true when dealing with foreign entities.
Any good business person looks at total cost of ownership when making a
purchase and not just the initial costs. It's a fact that no one is really
sure what the long term costs of GIS and other software developed by foreign
companies will cost U.S. businesses since we have no reasonable way to
address problems and grievances - at least for small companies. In short,
for a small firm, doing business with a foreign company is much more risky
than doing business with other U.S. firms and may not be all that cheap. The
whole idea needs to be carefully thought out.
Finally, Dimitri, I have a bit of a problem putting Xenophobic and United
States in the same sentence. We should maybe think that one out a bit more.
As some of my friends around here would say, "That dog don't hunt." :)
Oh... Also, I was wondering if anyone could tell me what my chances would be
if I scraped together a few hundred thousand dollars, fly to India, start a
company, hire a bunch of Indian developers dumb enough to work for the slave
wages I would pay, build some GIS software and sell it to the "Indian
masses?"
Mike
-----Original Message-----
From: Dimitri Rotow [mailto:dar@manifold.net]
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2003 4:38 PM
To: Mike: gislist@lists.thinkburst.com
Subject: RE: [gislist] Outsourcing GIS
>
> If IBM or some other large corporation has a contract problem while
> outsourcing to a different country, I am sure they have enough weight
> to protect themselves, but how does a small company in the mid-western
> U.S. with limited resources enforce a contract with a company in India
> or Viet Nam or other location? Also, how does a company with limited
> IT resources know that someone isn't coding back doors and other
> underhanded stuff into the software? How does a company know that its
> very important and propriety business methods isn't being sold by
> these software developers, and if they
> are, what recourse does the company have?
>
You don't know that with anyone that you hire to any certainty, regardless
of the country you are in. For example, Verisign holds itself out as a high
integrity company in the SSL certificate business (the only value they
have), yet they gullibly gave away Microsoft's SSL certificates to someone
that called up posing as a Microsoft guy.
The one thing I would suggest is that xenophobia is not an infallible path
to telling whether someone is trustworthy or not. The fact that people make
the mistake of trusting people who are near to them and distrusting people
who are far away is what keeps local scam artists in business and is one of
the factors that forces Indian firms to charge five times less. Because
people fear what is unfamiliar the new kid on the block has to work a lot
harder and provide better value to win business.
You can see this pattern repeated all the time. For example, five years ago
people were afraid to buy things over Internet. Now, hardly anyone buys an
airline ticket *except* through an online site.
Another example: years ago US companies were afraid to hire foreigners for
just the xenophobic reasons you cite. However, once it became clear that
the US educational system no longer taught mathematics at a sophisticated
enough level there was no choice but to hire Indians, Russians, Chinese,
Koreans, Pakistanis and the like for elite engineering positions and that
was the end of xenophobia.
A third example: I used to be a general manager at Intel during the
transition from 386 to 486 to Pentium and I knew those programs well. It
may come as a surprise for many people to learn that the 386 was the last
chip designed by "Americans"... over 60% of the staff on the 486 program
were foreigners, mostly Indians, Chinese, Russians, Pakistanis and Israelis.
The 486 was the last chip design run by an American manager, Pat Gelsinger.
With the 586 (renamed the "pentium") the percentage of foreign engineers
went over 90% and the manager in charge was Vhan Dham, an Indian. Why the
imbalance? Because it has gotten to the point that Americans are so bad at
math and other hard-core en
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