Replies to post #224075 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[federal reserves]

Punkle> Outsourcing - the lazy people

are the CEO's who can no longer think of ways to cut costs without hacking the jobs of hard working lower and middle income workers via foreign cheap labor. Its a bad sign, these fat cats are selling inside in record numbers while they trash the workers and pump up profits. Like Buffet says, if there is "classwar fare going on", my class is winning. If outsourcing is so good, why don't we outsource the military, hire a bunch of cheap labor, put them in uniforms and send them over to IRAQ to defend us. I hope to see many of these deals collapse with problems, cost overruns, security problems, R&D delays, customer service problems, patent rippoffs, production stalls, etc...

[webster groves]

<I am a big fan of "may the best team win" and if we're not currently the best team at a certain task than we don't deserve to win and need to go retool to become the best team again. No need to blame others for our own internal inadequacies.>

It's not a football game, it's a question of standard of living.

The guy overseas makes the product for less, not because he is more efficient, but because he is paid less. It's as simple as that. Any improvement in manufacturing efficiency (or education) on the home front can be similarly exported. It will be cheaper to do it overseas because it still costs less. Theoretically there is no end to this exportation of work until the overseas manufacturer can no longer undercut the domestic worker. Simplistically this happens when they both have the same standard of living. Globalization helps the weaker economies get stronger, and the strong get weaker (relative to each other). If a billion Chinese each have a dollar in their pockets, and 200 million Americans are equally well off, which nation has the stronger economy ? Which nation will have the biggest and most advanced military ? Maybe the US should rethink it's political posture relative to the up and coming mega-economy of China.

wg

[TJ Parker]

Outsourcing - I'm not sure why there's this big push to stop outsourcing and everyone thinks outsourcing is "unpatriotic."

maybe "enlightened self-interest" is a better word. as a software exec yourself, you must recognize the fact that you're pretty much pushing for the extinction of your own job in this country. right now, you're in an okay position, because the best indian talent, and the entrepreneurial engineers, were all pulled here to the u.s in the 90's. the ideas were here, the labor is there. but in the long run, software will be a pretty low-margin business. perhaps unless you have essential patents or it requires some skills that are uncommon. but e.g. once everyone knows what an office suite should look like, or a pdf reader, or a spreadsheet, there's nothing stopping the cheap clones .... the only impediment then is expensive u.s. management, which arguably is both more expensive and less cost-effective than setting up shop in india and hiring a few expensive u.s. software architects as consultants.

it was the same with consumer electronics.

[TJ Parker]

oh, and as an example, consider magma's recent purchase of mojave.

http://www.eedesign.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=18201252

mojave was formed by a couple guys from the eda industry who had experience with physical verification from working in various established companies. they get together and with a small team (something like 10 engineers, i think) build the core of a physical verification engine, which they then sell to magma for $40MM. building something like that does require quite a bit of specialized skill, but fortunately these guys all come from the industry where they were trained for doing just that. they don't have to step on patents or copyrights to benefit enormously from years of others' work that went into the design of the original products: knowing what the final product looked like - even from just working on parts of the code - tells them exactly what design decisions were made and which were rejected. so with a few people and in a short time they replicate what took orders of magnitude longer in man-years inside cadence and mentor graphics.

now i'm not saying that these guys themselves could have gone off to india (although they're mostly all indian to begin with) and lopped off a big chunk of business from mentor or cadence. those companies have a lock on the foundaries plus years of "trust". but in that respect, eda software is more the exception than the rule.