Saturday, August 07, 2004

India, July 2004

In July 2004, I had occasion to travel in India and Europe with my children and niece. This is the first time I had such a travel spanning several countries and continents.

Telecommunication infrastructure is still in early development stages in India. For a general information on India, please see my travelogue at http://india2004.blogspot.com.

Friday, August 06, 2004

Outsourcing and the US Economy

In the article titled "What Global Sourcing Means for U.S. IT Workers and for the U.S. Economy" in the July 2004 issue of the Communication of the ACM, author Catherine L. Mann argues that "A human-capital-investment tax credit would give workers and the firms the incentive they need to generate and upgrade U.S.-based IT skills to fill the need for more local IT workers."
Several questions would immediately arise in one's mind:

  1. How many companies are already doing it?
  2. Has the necessary legislation already been created? If not, where is the activity towards creating such a legislation?

Let us hope that part of the thinking during the 2004 Presidential campaign would begin to address this particular problem.

Thursday, August 05, 2004

City of San Jose and Cisco Systems

Today's news item regarding collusion between the city of San Jose and Cisco Systems makes for interesting reading. Although I am only a bystander to this story, it seems like this may not be a case of collusion. Rather, some uninformed individual or individuals must have retained Cisco's professional services group to help them out thinking that "nobody got fired for using Cisco" ... I can't believe any corporation, particularly one as business savvy as Cisco, would rig up a solution like the way the article suggests, that there was a collusion. It is interesting, however, to watch the audit report when it comes out tomorrow.

Monday, August 02, 2004

Use of Railroad Metaphor in the Computer & Networking Industry

The 21 July 2004 blog by Jonathan Schwartz is a wonderfully simple, but very thought-provoking, discussion of how he believes Sun can monetize Java. He has explained the monetization approach by comparing technological components that Sun has created or contributed to - namely, NFS, Java, J2EE, Project Liberty, etc. - to railroad gauges. "Once the [railroad gauge] standards were set", he argues, "these companies saw a massive increase in opportunity to sell - not rails - but locomotives and rail cars." You cannot but appreciate the argument but, of course, the proper "locomotives and rail cars" to ride on the "bandwidth railroad" would need to be created, and the companies creating the "locomotives and rail cars" are the ones that will make the money.