“Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers [sic], is likely to visit Bangalore in the first week of April. He is expected to launch Apple’s R&D center and technical support facility for its products here. The company plans to hire 3000 people in India by 2007,” Priya Padmanabhan reports for Cyber India Online.
“Jobs has special affinity to India. He had spent four years in the 1970’s as a ‘hippie spiritual tourist’ visiting holy places in the country,” Padmanabhan reports.
Full article here.
[Attribution; SpyMac.]
[UPDATE: 11:30am EST: Revised headline. We couldn’t resist. Thanks to Dave H.]
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Related articles:
Apple to hire 3,000 for massive technical support facility in Bangalore by 2007 – March 09, 2006
Apple Computer may set up tech support center in India – February 17, 2006
Fact: The United State graduates 50,000 engineers each year out of a population of almost 300 million.
Fact: China graduates 500,000 engineers each year in a population of approximately 1200 million.
Fact: A recent study showed that American parents are “very satisfied” with the level of math and science education American kids receive in school, despite the fact that U.S. kids score at the bottom of the heap on international math and science tests.
Observation: When these kids graduate from high school with 8th grade reading skills, 6th grade writing skills, and the inability to do math beyond basic arithmetic, the cry goes up about how America is “offshoring” good paying, highly skilled jobs to dastardly foreign powers.
Further Observation: These same whiners seem to be the ones that oppose rigorous educational standards, instead reveling in the false comfort of giving kids fake tests so they can get high scores and get those meaningless As and high school diplomas. The result? Millions of high school graduates who feel good about themselves as their education prepares them for the kind of skill needed to work at McDonald’s (where feeling good is top priority).
Final Observation: As Jay Leno’s Jaywalk proves beyond any reasonable doubt time and time again, far too many Americans are dumb and proud of it.
Wake up –
Well, Exxon isn’t an American company either, based on your analysis, since the vast majority of it’s operations are overseas… of course most of us dumb Americans still understand the concept of a global, multi-national corporation. I just wonder where the profits eventually wind up for most global firms. If they don’t end up back in the ‘home’ country then the entire arguement against multi-nationals, and their ‘so-called’ exploitation of undeveloped countries would have all been a load of crap… so which is it? Somehow I think Apple remains a quintessentially American company despite contract suppliers located overseas. I seriously doubt they’re going to have to find their innovation in Asia, or south Asia, where undoubtedly many good engineer clones are easy to find.
Math crunchers, geek coders and the like are not idea people as a general rule, and can’t design or create ideas outside of a typical box. Why do you think they’re usually stuffed away somewhere in a little cubicle?? In the end, they just become the newest generation of ‘labor’ doing the bidding of the real idea people who come up with visions, uses and needs to be met, or invented. I can invent on a paper napkin, and hire some engineer to do the grunt work, just like the best lawyers who never sit around in the libraries doing all the case research – they hire beginning lawyers and bookworms to do it for them, while they manage the strategies of cases, and make the big bucks. That’s why the CEO rides in the corporate jet, and the tech guys fix it…
And as long as we can keep underfunding schools, we’ll continue to have a VERY good reason for offshoring for talent
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” /> Just ensure there’s no talent here and it’s a “business necessity”.
No Child Left Behind indeed
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
Keep it Going–
Underfunded schools is a tired arguement. I can promise you that a India and China spend a FRACTION on their students as is spent here in the US. Public schools are disfunctional in this country for wide range of reasons, but lack of funding is not one of them.
lets be honest – Dell has lousy service regardless of where they have their help desk. India like all countries has good and bad talent (better quaility and quantity compared to the US)- it is up to Aapl to hire the right mix by paying up a little more than its competitors.
I am not the one generalizing – you guys are when you say all call centers in India are of poor quality – i reiterate Dell and other cos.who hire based on just cost will never have good service – it has to do nothing with the fact that they are in India.
You complain about India – but look at your IT dept in your co. almost 90% will be non-us and maybe 50% will be Indians – if they relaxed the visa restrictions maybe 70% will be Indians.
Keep it going! —
Nice try. But no cigar.
It’s actually bloated administration and administration staffing, teachers who can’t be fired and do everything possible to fight accountability and work review, and unions that are outdated.
THOSE are your problems with American education.
That, and the fact that more control should be returned to the state and local levels. We need Federal guidelines, but not nearly as much Federal interference.
‘Idea’ people, as you call them, are not the ones who make things happen. The Software Engineers, Electrical Engineers, etc are the people who make the ideas happen. Steve Jobs couldn’t get a Job at Apple as a Software Engineer on his admitted abilities and knowledge. The number of ‘idea’ people is and always be much smaller than those who translate a concept into reality. A Movie has one director but many skilled technical and artistic people who make the vision reality– the same is true in this context.
If you think the rapid decline of US ability and capability in the sciences and engineering is not a big deal I ask you to say this phrase out loud:
<b><i>You want Fries with that?<b><i>
Get used to it, you will be saying it a lot in the not-too-distant future.
‘Idea’ people, as you call them, are not the ones who make things happen. The Software Engineers, Electrical Engineers, etc are the people who make the ideas happen. Steve Jobs couldn’t get a Job at Apple as a Software Engineer on his admitted abilities and knowledge. The number of ‘idea’ people is and always be much smaller than those who translate a concept into reality. A Movie has one director but many skilled technical and artistic people who make the vision reality– the same is true in this context.
If you think the rapid decline of US ability and capability in the sciences and engineering is not a big deal I ask you to say this phrase out loud:
You want Fries with that?
Get used to it, you will be saying it a lot in the not-too-distant future.
I have a very bad feeling about this.
AAPL: Publicly traded company.
AAPL: Shareholders want returns on their investment.
AAPL: Will cut costs by any means necessary to meet sharholders demands/expectations.
AAPL is not owned by AAPL, it is owned by shareholders.
It’s just information – process it as you like.
Alright… so what!?
I never got any fuss about Apple making all it’s chips off-shore… I got my MacBook Pro from China!… got an iBook from Taiwan… and only my G4 tower from US… and that was only for the first round of my G4s.
I just hope that the Indian engineers of Apple will do as well as the rest of Apple people.
Cheers and wish luck to Apple for even more expansion… Maybe next R&D Center will be in Iran!!!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
Subject: Global Labor Arbitrage – IT
Globalization takes the wrinkles and creases out of the planet. You can
now eat the same Chinese food in Newport News as in New Delhi. You can buy the same clothes in Toronto as in Quangzshou. You can live in the same apartment, designed by the same architect, and built of the same materials in Buenos Aires as in Belfast. And of course, you can watch CNN
everywhere.
Chief Economist Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley sees his seismograph twitching:
“First in manufacturing, now in services, the global labor arbitrage
has been unrelenting in pushing U.S. pay rates down to international norms. But the real wage compression in the United States has not been uniform across the income spectrum. In large part, that has occurred because increasingly broad segments of the American labor market are now exposed to a uniquely powerful competitive force – the IT-enabled arbitrage. Courtesy of the hyper-speed of sharply accelerating Internet
penetration, the global labor arbitrage has pushed into areas that historically have
been unaccustomed to wage competition. In earlier research I found that
the disconnect between compensation and productivity growth during the current economic expansion has been much greater in services than inmanufacturing. This once nontradable segment of the U.S. economy is now feeling the increasingly powerful forces of the global labor arbitrage
for the first time ever.
“The Internet has forever changed the competitive climate for most
white-collar knowledge workers. Courtesy of near-ubiquitous
connectivity, the output of the knowledge worker can now be e-mailed to a desktop from anywhere in the world. That brings low-cost, well-trained, highly educated workers in Bangalore, Shangha! i, and Eastern and Central Europe into the global knowledge-worker pool. That’s now true of software programmers, engineers, designers, as well as a broad array of professionals toiling in legal, accounting, medical, actuarial, consulting, and financial-analyst positions. Within this global pool of like-quality workers, a powerful arbitrage acts to narrow wage disparities. As a result, real wage compression in open economies like the United States has moved rapidly up the value chain – sparing an increasingly small portion of those at the very top of the occupational hierarchy. In short, the IT-enabled global labor arbitrage is a guaranteed recipe for mounting income inequality.”
Income inequality has been growing in the United States for the last 35
years, says Roach. We have explained why many times. Per capital income is $1,700 in China. It is $38,000 in America. As the Chinese (and others) compete with American workers, the low end of the wage scale in the United States is held down. Since the wage difference is so great, this
process has a long way to go. While he goes deeper and deeper into debt, the average American employee may not enjoy any real income growth for the next two decades.
The rich, on the other hand, continue to make rapid financial progress.
They are the ones who own the companies that benefit from lower wages
and globalized markets.
Economists measure wage equality with way they call a Gini Index. At
zero, people all earn the same thing. At 100, the rich get all the income.
Currently, in Japan the Gini Index is 25. In Europe, it is 32. In
America, the index is at 40, and in China, it is at 45.
In America, low-level earners can’t get ahead because they have no
bargaining power. They are competing with a billion workers in Asia
willing to do the same work for less than one-tenth the cost. And in
China, there is also growing income inequality between those who have
joined the global economy and those who have not. Some 500 million
people live in coastal cities in China and participate in modern commerce, but
there are another 700 million who still live in the countryside. While
the cities grow richer, the poor in China are left behind, like America’s
industrial workers.
In short, the world is not getting flatter at all. It is getting
flatter in some areas, and steeper in others. There is less difference between
China’s industrial workers and those in America, but the difference
between the globalized wage slave and the capitalists who employ them
is growing.
Beneath the surface of Friedman’s flat Earth, the pressure is growing
-either in China or in America and sooner or later, it is bound to
explode.
To Ed
Unions are killing this country????
Let me see if I understand you: Apple made the choice to move to Bangalore and you blame the unions and since their tech support centre in the US is unlikely to be unionized, it’s still the unions fault.
Got it! I can clearly see the connection now. This has nothing to do with executives pandering to greedy shareholders, it’s the unions fault. It always is.
I think Jobs is going to India to launch Apple’s R&D center and technical support facility for its products to be sold in India such as the iPod. It has long been known that India has a huge middle class. I have reason to believe the report is inaccurate.
It’s funny how this April Fool’s joke of a story has turned into a flame war about outsourcing.
I doubt that Apple will open a center employing 3000, or 25% of their current employment, anywhere.
i always believed that india had a huge gap between the upper class and the lower class.
and that people were generally either very wealthy or very poor.
or is it a case of their sheer population, that even though they have a comparably small middle class, that because of the huge population that this is still a very large number of people?
No, it’s not trying to get a foothold into selling Apple products in India. Althought, Apple is vertually unknown in that country. Have you ever called there about any problems with software that supports both Microsoft and Mac. The techy doesn’t know anything about Macs except for what’s on their script to tell you. I have a very bad feeling about this.
Sorry, it’s not untapped technical talent that Apple is looking for, it’s cheap labor. Nothing more. I for one am very disappointed by this decision. Let’s not try to spin this into anything more than what it really is. Does anyone have an actual e-mail address that you can write and make my feelings heard?
Does anyone know if apple is outsourcing its R&D to india. And is it keeping the workers here. And not just getting rid of them and getting india.