Effect of the US Election
BTW : Blogger's been acting weird the past few days - wouldn't let me post anything. Hope to catch up with my writing this week.
Now back to our scheduled feature :
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Matter Bhai raised an interesting question in his comment to the previous post. I'm sure this thought is on many minds right now - How does the recent election affect the outsourcing scenario in India?
Let me say at the outset that I'm not very conversant with the finer points of the Republican and Democrats' election promises, beyond their stands on outsourcing. I do know that Kerry gained some brownie points with the public by promising to shut down outsourcing; but he had to back off later. In case he'd won, he would probably have had to back off even more, and things would have pretty much remained the same. Let me explain.
I'm reminded of an old editorial cartoon, published shortly after Bush Sr.'s appointment as president. He's surrounded by a bewildering array of levers, buttons, switches, leading off into all sorts of machinery. The machinery is labelled "US Government", and Bush is having a hard time managing it. He says, "Gosh, all this looked so easy when I was one of the cogs!"
The short of it is, running a government involves a lot of things - many more than making election promises. I'd guess that keeping the economy running smoothly figures in the top ten. The recent rise of outsourcing was never a political decision. It was always an economic choice, and is partly responsible for the US economy doing reasonably well after the 2000-01 slump.
If a company is outsourcing to India, and thus producing software in half the time and in lower budget, it gains an edge over it's competitors. Which company would agree to stop this outsourcing? And if the outsourcing is stopped in the US, European competitors would then have the advantage. In my mind, a consortium of big, tax-paying companies has more influence in government policies than a few jobless workers walking around with placards.
This means that whoever is running the US government (assuming he wants to stay in power) will have to keep the companies happy. If Kerry had stepped into the Presidents shoes, he'd have found that stopping outsourcing would have gotten him into bad trouble, and wriggled out of it. To answer your question - I don't think the recent election will make any difference to the outsourcing scene. Outsourcing is a reliable method by which a company can reduce its costs (never mind the details I talk about in other essays here). As long as there's market competition, as long as sending work to India helps a company, it will happen in one form or the other.
Now back to our scheduled feature :
-----------
Matter Bhai raised an interesting question in his comment to the previous post. I'm sure this thought is on many minds right now - How does the recent election affect the outsourcing scenario in India?
Let me say at the outset that I'm not very conversant with the finer points of the Republican and Democrats' election promises, beyond their stands on outsourcing. I do know that Kerry gained some brownie points with the public by promising to shut down outsourcing; but he had to back off later. In case he'd won, he would probably have had to back off even more, and things would have pretty much remained the same. Let me explain.
I'm reminded of an old editorial cartoon, published shortly after Bush Sr.'s appointment as president. He's surrounded by a bewildering array of levers, buttons, switches, leading off into all sorts of machinery. The machinery is labelled "US Government", and Bush is having a hard time managing it. He says, "Gosh, all this looked so easy when I was one of the cogs!"
The short of it is, running a government involves a lot of things - many more than making election promises. I'd guess that keeping the economy running smoothly figures in the top ten. The recent rise of outsourcing was never a political decision. It was always an economic choice, and is partly responsible for the US economy doing reasonably well after the 2000-01 slump.
If a company is outsourcing to India, and thus producing software in half the time and in lower budget, it gains an edge over it's competitors. Which company would agree to stop this outsourcing? And if the outsourcing is stopped in the US, European competitors would then have the advantage. In my mind, a consortium of big, tax-paying companies has more influence in government policies than a few jobless workers walking around with placards.
This means that whoever is running the US government (assuming he wants to stay in power) will have to keep the companies happy. If Kerry had stepped into the Presidents shoes, he'd have found that stopping outsourcing would have gotten him into bad trouble, and wriggled out of it. To answer your question - I don't think the recent election will make any difference to the outsourcing scene. Outsourcing is a reliable method by which a company can reduce its costs (never mind the details I talk about in other essays here). As long as there's market competition, as long as sending work to India helps a company, it will happen in one form or the other.
posted by Sudarshan | 9:41 PM
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