Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

IT Productivity
A few years ago, a few of Microsoft's competitors began questioning the "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) of Microsoft products. Microsoft's competitors noted that installation, training, updates and general maintenance of Microsoft products accounted for far more expenditures than just the purchase price of the software.

Microsoft responded by incorporating new remote and automatic management features into its products, such as IntelliMirror and Active Directory. Windows 2003 Server adds web-based remote management and many other management features.

The result is that today's IT environments often require far fewer IT workers than they did a few years ago. Thus, the overall IT job market has been hit by a triple-whammy of productivity improvements, IT market collapse/recession, and offshoring of many IT jobs. The latter indirectly impacts IT support staffs in the sense that if there are fewer IT intensive workers in the U.S., there is also less work for IT support staff.

Microsoft products used to demand a labor intensive management process. Many products, both from Microsoft and third-parties, such as Opsware, now enable significant reductions in IT staff as worker productivity is dramatically improved. Microsoft is finally catching up to where it should have been. (Although I will note that frequency security patches and the need to repeatedly update and run anti-virus and spyware removal tools also cause huge headaches for IT staff members, especially during the past month.)

I can remember when desktop clients were configured by an IT person walking from office to office with a stack of CDs. That gave way to running installs from a network file share. That now has given way to remote installation from a network server - a server that runs the whole show New technologies are dramatically improving the IT overhead of running server farms and remotely managing - and even repairing - network infrastructures. All this means fewer IT workers are needed - certainly less than the silly ITAA estimate of 1.6 million new IT workers made in the year 2000.  That was a fraudulent estimate. The real estimate was that there would be about 12% job turnover, hence, 1.2 million positions would open, and 400,000 actual new jobs, not 1.6 million, would open up. Most (1.2 million) would be filled by workers moving from job to job.

Unfortunately, the ITAA used that false report to drum up support to import up to 200,000 temporary foreign tech workers. Who have 3 to 6 years would be trained by us, and would go back home to then compete with us within economies who's comparative advantage is poverty. Hence, they earn 1/10th the amount of US workers.

Worse, the ITAA's numbers caused a lot of people to train in IT - producing an actual surplus of workers on the market. You can safely ignore news reports that are proclaiming a "shortage of tech workers" again. Those are shill pieces looking to try and influence government for more goodies.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:46:38 AM        >

1 in 6 Silicon Valley jobs could be sent offshore ... and its not just tech workers ...
"What's happening to employment in America is unprecedented. But policy makers aren't even pretending to understand. This is going to get mighty ugly."... says Dan Gilmor of the San Jose Mercury News. Says the SF Bay area is dead center in the offshoring phenomenon. Scary times.

"If workers who lose their jobs to offshoring stay in the same field, they probably can expect to earn less".

California industries where there is job growth pay 40% less than those where jobs are shifting offshore. In other words, California is losing high paying jobs and gaining low paying jobs. The U.S.'s salvation is said to be that we will just innovate our way out of this mess - in other words, have faith that it will all work out and that the 2.5 billion people over there can't come up with equal innovations....

[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:46:08 AM        >

A jobless recovery - or a big change in economic theories?
The same economists who are confident that offshoring is a good thing (so more must be better!) are now realizing that their economic theories are not accounting for the continuing job losses.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:45:38 AM        >

This story proclaims that American workers are now moving to India to take advantage of the boom in offshoring jobs to India. But read the fine print. With a 1 Billion population, there are just 30,000 foreigners work in India. And many of those "foreigners" turn out to be Indian ex-pats returning to work in India. This is what some call "free trade": The U.S. imports many millions of foreign workers yet their countries import almost none.
[Edward Mitchell: Common Sense Technology]
comments < 9:45:22 AM        >

Solution 1:  Allow global price arbitrage in pharmaceutical pricing.  Here's a BIG problem that if corrected can help our trade deficit and slow offshoring.  Health insurance costs are expensive in the US.  It makes US workers much more expensive relative to competitors globally (which in turn drives our trade deficit and offshoring).  So why do we allow US pharms to charge us twice as much as they charge international customers?  Drug costs are a HUGE part of healthcare costs.  We need some drug price arbitrage fast (!) or some legislation that says that US prices for patented drugs (as a prerequisite for the patent protection)must be the same as the lowest price charged globally.

This is the first of some solutions that will help make the US more competitive without protectionism. [John Robb's Weblog]

comments < 9:43:46 AM        >

Imagine a facewall like this as active wallpaper on your PC desktop.  Each picturre would contain one click contact info (VoIP phone, IM, e-mail threads, and fax), presence (IM "I'm online"), GPS data (for your family), etc.  New messages would be highlighted on the picture.  Contacts can be grouped/outlined by high level pictures (family, company, etc.), just click to drill down.  [John Robb's Weblog]
comments < 9:43:02 AM        >

"Printing" concrete homes.  Nice. [John Robb's Weblog]
comments < 9:42:27 AM        >


WSJ.  Trade deficit reaches new record:  $43.1 b in January.

But America's politically sensitive trade deficit with China expanded to $11.5 billion in January, up from $9.9 billion in December. China's currency is pegged to the dollar at a fixed rate, but U.S. manufacturers contend that the Chinese yuan is now undervalued, giving that country a big trade advantage.

Solution #2:  All US trading partners must agree to free float their currencies against the dollar.  The appreciation of the Euro against the dollar has already narrowed our deficit with them (but not enough yet). [John Robb's Weblog]

comments < 9:42:10 AM        >

Spirit Takes Snapshot of Earth [Slashdot]
comments < 9:41:15 AM        >