Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Tuesday, March 09, 2004
OK. Everybody else in the world had something to say about Janet, so I passed. But I've been thinking about the high tech job outsourcing issue. Like Janet, it's suddenly everywhere. It's very real for people in the IT and communications industries (where my clients and their customers are concentrated), and it's going to become more pervasive as bandwidth gets cheaper. One of the more interesting takes is by Thomas Friedman of the NY Times (author of "The Lexus and the Olive Tree"), who announced in an article a week or two ago that he had simply missed the size and significance of the trend. Here's his latest:
> The secret of our sauce - New York Times New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman takes a closer look at the culture of innovation within the U.S., arguing that much of the uproar surrounding overseas IT outsourcing may be over-hyped: "America is the
greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial
markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products." As long as companies such as Google and Amazon.com keep "creating leading edge technologies that make their companies more productive," the U.S. may have little to fear from countries such as India or China, says Friedman.
http://www.corante.com/venture/redir/41255.html
I suspect he's correct in the near term, but I am less sure that he is right in the long term. The reason is that I just don't see that our attributes are so unique that they can't be recreated elsewhere. There is a non-partisan American penchant for proselytizing (like the alliteration?) on behalf of democracy, individual rights and free market economies. It seems to me that if we are successful as we hope to be, we will (deliberately?) lose our competitive advantage and bring other countries up to our level. We may be the only civilization in history that, recognizing that the potential worldwide success of its governing ideology contains the seeds of its own decline, nonetheless pushed forward.
> The secret of our sauce - New York Times New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman takes a closer look at the culture of innovation within the U.S., arguing that much of the uproar surrounding overseas IT outsourcing may be over-hyped: "America is the
greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial
markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products." As long as companies such as Google and Amazon.com keep "creating leading edge technologies that make their companies more productive," the U.S. may have little to fear from countries such as India or China, says Friedman.
http://www.corante.com/venture/redir/41255.html
I suspect he's correct in the near term, but I am less sure that he is right in the long term. The reason is that I just don't see that our attributes are so unique that they can't be recreated elsewhere. There is a non-partisan American penchant for proselytizing (like the alliteration?) on behalf of democracy, individual rights and free market economies. It seems to me that if we are successful as we hope to be, we will (deliberately?) lose our competitive advantage and bring other countries up to our level. We may be the only civilization in history that, recognizing that the potential worldwide success of its governing ideology contains the seeds of its own decline, nonetheless pushed forward.
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