Posted on 12/14/2002 10:22:42 AM PST by arete
Not bloody likely. I know LOTS of companies that tried it with the best of intentions, but I don't know of any that stuck with that program for any length of time. It is a guaranteed disaster almost every time. Parity mismatch between theory and reality, big time.
Let me put it this way: All this experimentation with Far East programming teams in the exuberant '90s has thoroughly poisoned the chance of it ever being considered again for a long time. They had their chance and left a bad enough impression that even the second-hand reputation of such things is branded in people's minds.
I give you a cold hard fact, and I get anecdotes in return? Spent much time in the bread lines lately?
Interesting how trial lawyers and union members are typically RATS. The RATS seem attract anyone who wants to suck on the government teet or that of society, in general.
Forever. As long as we produce value for other people, such as by our services. You've been running a trade deficit with your local supermarket since the first day you set foot in there - how long can you sustain that?
Forever, of course. As long as you produce value for other people ;)
"The best starting point in trying to understand the consequences for American economic power is to remember that, where trade is concerned, a nation is like a household. A household that spends more than it earns is living in a fool’s paradise. To pay the bills, it must either run up credit or sell the family silver. Neither option is attractive. Loans have to be repaid and in the meantime the interest charges mount up. As for selling the family silver, you can do that only once. Beyond a certain point therefore living beyond your means becomes unsustainable. And the reckoning, when it comes, can be devastating.
Exactly the same logic applies to nations. In its efforts to finance the trade deficits, America is borrowing ever more heavily from abroad. Much of this borrowing is being done in the name of American banks and American corporations. But the U.S. government is also becoming increasingly dependent on foreign capital. And the interest bills are mounting exponentially.
As for selling the family silver, the United States is now within the space of a single generation presiding over the sell-off of much of its industrial and commercial base. Need it be added that this base required the sweat and enterprise of many earlier generations to create.
Such erstwhile pillars of American industry as Amoco and Chrysler have been bought by foreigners. Recently Lucent, which owns the fabled Bell Labs, came within an ace of being succumbing to the French.
Large parts of Wall Street have come under foreign control. Names like Bankers Trust, First Boston, Scudder, Alliance Capital, Republic Bank, Kemper Corporation, and Dillon Read may still sound American but these former pillars of the American financial establishment are now controlled from places like Zurich, Frankfurt, Paris, London, and Hong Kong.
Even the American mind is coming under foreign ownership. On one estimate, German media conglomerates have bought more than half the American book publishing industry. Other foreign companies control much of the rest.
Despite its image as a quintessentially American phenomenon, the New Economy has not escaped the trend. Tokyo-based Softbank Corporation, for instance, is the dominant shareholder in hundreds of cyberspace businesses, most notably Yahoo! and E*TRADE. Meanwhile, Paris-based LVMH is a major investor in the Datek online brokerage firm as well as in Cisco Systems and MP3.com.
Already the great American sell-off has gone so far that America's economic standing on the world stage has been dramatically diminished. While that may not be obvious to the American public, it is apparent in national asset/liabilities figures published by the International Monetary Fund. These show that in the first nine years of the 1990s alone, America's net foreign liabilities ballooned from $49 billion to $1,537 billion. And that’s only the beginning. Because financing costs (in the form of interest and dividends paid to foreigners) are now compounding rapidly to the problem, America’s net foreign liabilities are set to soar in coming years irrespective of whether Washington succeeds in reining in the growth in America’s imports.
It is hard to exaggerate the significance of America’s mounting foreign liabilities. The figures are there in black and white in the IMF’s statistics books. Yet they have been completely ignored by the American press.
If this trend continues, the power of foreign bankers, investors, and financial regulators will soon become a dominant force in American public life. This has profound implications for everything from the value of the U.S. dollar and the level of U.S. interest rates to the way American corporations are run. Basically the issue is who owns America."
http://www.unsustainable.org/
Seeing that we just signed a free-trade agreement with Chile, the answer to your question is probably yes. Things change. The only thing that won't change is folks yelping about how we're losing our high-paying jeans-sewing jobs to other countries.
They are trying to create a viable market. Right now it isn't one. They are looking at this more on the sales side than on the software engineering side. Regardless, those two companies only account for a miniscule part of the total software effort in the US. And only they had enough money to attempt to bludgeon some usefulness out of that region.
A lot of the real outsourcing is happening in the Euro-sphere. Many companies outsource to Canada ('cause they're exactly like Americans results-wise, but cheaper), and to a lesser extent Europe (unemployment is so high that you can find competent young people for very cheap with better quality of results than is typical of Asia). When Asia can produce results as good as our geographically and culturally closer neighbors, they will remain uncompetitive in this arena.
Interestingly, South America has been popping up on my radar lately in the software outsourcing realm. The quality of the results appears to be on par with Europe, and priced like Asia.
Only companies that make a profit and remain competitive stay in business. Period.
Unions certainly have a way of driving businesses overseas. The one I belonged to first drove business to the south, and then overseas. I had to learn a new trade.
What Americans need to do is stop buying made in (non-USA) items whenever possible, go that extra mile to check the label, if it doesn't say made in USA and getting this item isn't a must have at the moment, don't buy it.
It really depends on how much extra people are willing to pay for made in the USA goods.
Are we for example, willing to pay twice as much for clothing to avoid buying imports?
If so, then we also have to realize that means we will have less money to spend on other things, which means less money for other areas of our economy, which also can cost made in the USA jobs...and on top of it we will have to lower our standard of living.
It's a trade-off.
U.S. exports of manufactured products in 1999 were 66 percent higher than 1992, rising to $612 billion in 1999. U.S. exports of high technology products in 1999, a subcategory of manufactured products, were 87 percent higher than 1992, rising to $200 billion in 1999.Source: Office of the U.S. Trade RepresentativeThe five largest manufacturing sectors in terms of U.S. exports were: Transportation Equipment ($124.8 billion of exports in1999), Electronic and Electric Equipment ($118.8 billion), Industrial Machinery and Computers ($118.1 billion), Chemical Products ($67.2 billion), and Scientific and Measuring Instruments ($41.8 billion). These five sectors accounted for nearly 70 percent of the United States' total goods exports in 1999.
The United States is the world's largest agricultural exporting country, shipping $48 billion in agricultural exports abroad. The largest export categories, coarse grains, soybeans, red meat, and wheat, accounted for 38 percent of the United States'agricultural exports in 1999. Total exports to NAFTA countries in 1999 were 78 percent higher than 1993 (pre-NAFTA), rising from $142 billion in 1993 to $253 billion in 1999. During 1999, Canada was the United States' largest export market, while Mexico was the United States' 2nd largest export market. Exports to Canada in 1999 were 66 percent ($66 billion) higher than 1993, rising to $166 billion in 1999. U.S. exports to Mexico in 1999 were 109 percent ($45 billion) higher than 1993, rising to $87 billion in 1999.
IBM, Intel, Motorola, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and other large corporations are shifting a lot of work to India. The trend of moving high tech development of chips and software to other countries is not a positive direction for America. It is occuring, all you need to do is to read the technolgy news magazines.
You forgot football.
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