Outsourcing
Infoworld, 4/12/04: CTO Connection: Is my job still relevant?
Sorry, naysayers, but the skills to apply technology effectively will never go out of style
By Chad Dickerson
All of us in IT are in the unfortunate position of having to justify our existence.
Recently, I assembled a group of CTOs at InfoWorld's home office to discuss some of the challenges that CTOs face. The talk quickly turned to the role of the CTO in the current IT environment, one that has changed drastically since the CTO position emerged in the late 1990s. It? even changed since I wrote about the difference between CIOs and CTOs just three years ago.
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The Wall Street Journal, 4/12/04: Behind Outsourcing Debate: Surprisingly Few Hard Numbers
Counting Jobs Moving Abroad Is a Complicated Task; It Has Some Benefits, Too
One Report: 'A Little Wobbly'
By JON E. HILSENRATH
Desperate to cut costs in its struggling Internet-equipment business, executives at Infineon Technologies AG decided last year to eliminate 40 high-paying engineering jobs at its San Jose research facility and transfer the work to India.
At about the same time, the German semiconductor company started adding about 150 engineers and other white-collar workers at its operations in Cary, N.C., and Burlington, Vt., catering to a different set of customers.
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The New York Times, 4/12/04: Presidential Politics Divide Silicon Valley
By LAURIE J. FLYNN
SAN FRANCISCO, April 11 - Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who in 1995 made a fortune taking Netscape public, is not returning calls from the Democratic Party these days.
In the last two election cycles, Mr. Andreessen donated $350,000 to Democratic candidates, including a single $250,000 check to the Democratic National Committee during Al Gore's 2000 run for the White House. He even held a dinner at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., for John Kerry's Senate campaign in 2000.
But for now, he is sitting this one out. "If they're going to run on an anti-business message, forget me," he said.
Mr. Andreessen is angered by Senator Kerry's position on outsourcing, the growing trend of farming out white-collar technical jobs to lower-wage countries like India and China. Senator Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, vows to remove tax incentives for businesses moving jobs overseas.
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GigaoOm, 4/11/04: Dark Side of Outsourcing
Saturday night, Delhi border… Odyssey night club… the music is clearly local - bollywood and bhangra hits mixed with some popular songs from the 80s and 90s. Beer is flowing, bodies writhing and people generally seem to be having fun. The night club which is in one of the newer malls that have come up in Gurgaon, a dusty former cow patch, now a shiny suburban high tech haven, is one of the most popular destinations from those who work in the outsourcing/call center business. The place comes alive after midnight when apparently there is a shift change.
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Security
Internetnews.com, 4/9/04: IE Vulnerability Flagged
By Jim Wagner
The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) has published a security flaw that has no complete workaround, leaving PCs at risk even if protective steps are taken.
The vulnerability lets attackers trick the InfoTech Storage (ITS) protocol handlers in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to grab scripts from another domain (server) and gain the same privileges as those found in the victim's Local Machine Zone.
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IT Management
Computerworld, 4/9/04: Outsourcing sparks concerns over IT controls to meet Sarbanes-Oxley
IT auditors worry that outsourcers may not provide the documentation needed to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley
News Story by Thomas Hoffman
Corporate and external IT auditors who attended a conference on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act here this week said they're growing increasingly concerned about the ability of IT outsourcing vendors to effectively document the internal controls they have in place to support their clients' regulatory compliance efforts.
Ken Vander Wal, a partner in the technology security and risk services practice at Ernst & Young LLP in Chicago, noted that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board issued a statement on March 9 saying that the use of service providers doesn't reduce the responsibility of corporate executives for maintaining effective internal controls.
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Microsoft
eWeek, 4/12/04: Ballmer: Onward to the Enterprise
By Peter Galli, Stan Gibson and Eric Lundquist
On April 2, Microsoft Corp. President and CEO Steve Ballmer and Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy announced a major settlement to end Sun's lawsuits and cross-license patented technologies. Last week, Ballmer met with eWEEK Editor in Chief Eric Lundquist, Executive Editor Stan Gibson and Senior Editor Peter Galli on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., to explain how Microsoft's agreement with the Santa Clara, Calif., company—which cost Microsoft close to $2 billion—will enable the company to drive deeper into the enterprise.
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I, Cringely, 4/8/04: The Once and Future King
Now the Only Way Microsoft Can Die is by Suicide
By Robert X. Cringely
When I wrote last week about my conclusion that the legal system -- any legal system -- is unequipped to change Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, I had no idea that within 24 hours, Sun Microsystem would be throwing in the towel, trading its so-called principles for $1.95 billion in cash. So I guess I was right. Only now, a few thousand readers out there expect me to blithely produce an answer to the problem of what to do to bring Microsoft into the civilized world. Well, I say it can't be done.
Readers had ideas of their own. Some thought the government would dissolve Microsoft, but failed to note that the DoJ case against Redmond is over and Microsoft won. Where the governmental resolve would come to dissolve one of the greatest successes in world business is beyond me.
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C|net, 4/12/04: Microsoft: Not enough XPerienced PCs
By Ina Fried
While Microsoft is pleased with robust sales of new PCs that come loaded with Windows XP, the company has been less than satisfied with the rate at which large companies are installing its latest operating system.
"In the area of deployment, I don't think that's met my expectations," Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's group vice president for worldwide sales and marketing, told CNET News.com in a recent interview.
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