The New Face of Global Competition

/*snip*/ A decade ago, Wipro was an anonymous conglomerate selling cooking oil and personal computers, mostly in India. Today, it is a $903 million-a-year global company, and most of its business comes from information-technology services. Since 1997, Wipro's revenue has grown by an average of 26% a year while profits have grown by 69%. Its 15,000 technologists write software, integrate back-office solutions, design semiconductors, debug applications, take orders, and field help calls for some of the biggest companies in the world. They are as good at doing all of that as anyone in the world. Perhaps better. And they are cheaper -- on average about 40% cheaper -- than comparable American companies.

It is an irresistible force, and it's on the rise. Three years ago, Bangalore was the software world's biggest body shop, offering coders at $2 an hour. Now Wipro and a few rivals are moving upstream, swinging into such high-value services as consulting, integration, and architecture. Increasingly, Wipro is competing with Accenture, EDS, IBM, and the big accounting firms. And as often as not, it's winning. /*unsnip*/

/*snip*/ At the same time, Wipro has embraced quality. In six years, it has trained 7,000 employees in Six Sigma and completed 1,000 quality projects. Six years ago, Fast Company profiled a team at Lockheed-Martin that wrote nearly perfect code ( "They Write the Right Stuff," Dec : Jan 1997 ). The team's claim to fame: It was one of only four outfits in the world to achieve Level 5 certification from the Software Engineering Institute. Wipro has Level 5 certification in three different categories. It's eye-glazing stuff, but an amazing achievement.

Such accomplishments confirmed that Wipro's developers weren't just cheap: They were cheap and very, very good. It was enough to distinguish them from every aspiring dollar-an-hour coder in Malaysia, Russia, and South Africa. /*unsnip*/

I've been a computer programmer for more than a decade, and up until now I've ignored the people worried about our tech jobs going offshore because the quality and high end service wasn't there with the Indian products. Well, it looks like they've caught on folks, and those of us who haven't already been chased out of the industry may find ourselves displaced by $5,000 a year Indian developers with masters degrees.

And lest the rest of you think your jobs are safe, get a load of this clip from the article:

"Here's what he will tell the executives at J.P. Morgan Chase: "What's happening now in services is what happened 15 years ago in manufacturing. It started in software, in application development. It's moving to software-enabled services. Call centers, legal services, medical. Wherever work can be removed and done somewhere else, it will be done where it's most cost-effective.

"Take a large law firm. The clerks and paralegals could be trained in India, serving partners and associates in the U.S. Salomon Smith Barney has a big research staff here. Why can't 60% of its reports be done from India? Why should they require everyone to be in the United States?" Wipro just signed a contract to interpret radiology images for a major American research hospital. Indian radiologists will, in effect, provide the hospital's second and third shifts."

The article also goes into the Indian takeover of hardware design and engineering projects (why pay an American electronics engineer $100,000 a year to design a circuit board when an Indian engineer will do the same job at the same quality for $8,000?).

These people have only one goal, to gut the American middle class by taking away the only good paying jobs we have left. What's worse is that this crap only benefits the leftists. With our manufacturing base already decimated, our farming base already consolidating into ever fewer hands, and our service jobs going out the window, what will Americans do for money? What happens when Joe Suburbanite and his family of four watches house after house on his street go up for sale because nobody is employed enough to pay their mortgages? What happens when vast legions of formerly well paid white collar employees are stuck flipping burgers while simmering over what they've lost? Eventually, they'll revolt, and who do you think will win? Us, with our "business creates jobs" agenda? Or the leftists with their "lets bring business under government control" agenda? We conservatives need to figure out how to address this issue NOW before it's too late and we hand the advantage to the opposition.

Yes it is market competition, and we can whine and complain about it all we want, but the "invisible hand" is doing its work here. Technology has made many jobs redudant, and those jobs that remain are being done for less money oversees. So what's the answer? The pessimist in me says that Americans are going to have to adjust their expectations a bit, and realize that the rest of the world is beginning to catch up to us, and in the mean time our standard of living is going to fall until the rest of the world reaches an equilibrium point, where Indian wages eventually rise to meet ours. But the optimist in me says that America still has a competitive advantage in the level of economic freedom we enjoy relative to the rest of world. But regardless we need to adjust our thinking a bit as to how workers create value, we must all become, in essence, entrepreneurs whether we like it or not.

Maybe I'm missing something, but can't quite see the conservative objection to this - isn't it straightforward market competition?

Competition? How do you "compete" with people that will do your job for $15 a DAY?!? The ONLY way for America to compete with these people is to lower our costs and standard of living to their level...we'd have to turn the U.S. into a third world country in order to survive. With biotech research increasingly being done overseas and nanotech up against some technological walls, there is NOTHING coming down the pipe for white collar employees to move into. My parents were smart enough to recognize the fact that manufacturing jobs would be eliminated by the time I was ready to start a career, so they stoked my interest in computers and pushed me in that direction. I'm now looking at a possible decimation of the service industry wondering "Where the hell do I push MY son?"

An America without good jobs is an America I wouldn't want to live in.

Capitalism means companies have to abandon the nations and people who made them big in the first place? I don't buy that. Capitalism is the process of making a profit and accumulating or reinvesting it into your business. It has existed for thousands of years, and has proven itself to be the freest and most flexible economic system man has developed. What we have today is not capitalism, it is slash-and-burn economic corporatism.

Corporations are a man-made entity, not found anywhere in nature and not created by God. We as a nation have passed laws allowing the formation of corporations because they provide us with beneficial services...namely products we use and jobs we need. What has happened today is that corporations have forgotten the pact that was made so long ago in their quest to "maximize profits". They are eliminating the jobs we need and in so doing are also eliminating our ability to buy the things we want. I personally feel that it's time to re-examine the laws of incorporation granted by our states and federal legal systems and modify them to provide greater benefit to the nation. We provide the owners of corporations with special rights and insulations so that they can make a profit, but what is America getting in return?

But nobody has yet addressed my main question: When white collar jobs and the manufacturing sector are completely decimated by jobs moving offshore, when previously well paid people can't afford food for their hungry children, when America starts to slide into third-world status because we've crippled our own economy in the name of "reduced costs", the unemployed masses are going to vote for whoever gets them jobs again. When the socialists come marching in trumpeting 2000% labor tariffs and government control of "those evil corporations exporting YOUR jobs", you know as well as I that they'll win. So how do we protect American jobs and prevent the socialists from coming to power?

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