Why the next GM or Ford could be Microsoft and Oracle.

[gjoe]

To make a long story short, the US economy is a consumer economy. So the people here should spend (consume goods and services ) to keep the economy in good shape. To spend they have to earn, to earn they have to produce some service or goods which has value. The banks and wall st firms produced worthless piles of paper ( e-documents) for decades to amass this false wealth for so long. Some call this whole thing a ponzi scheme and some call it economic depression.
But I think we EB aliens too have a part in this scheme. Skilled labor(skilled EB aliens) is a commodity which is imported into US. The buyer is the actual employer. In between these two there are many agents you can call themselves lawyers, body shopper, offshore agency, middle tier vendor, preferred vendor, etc, etc,. So between the buyer and the raw material (skilled EB worker) there are so many layers amounting to 50% of the cost. This in turn results in goods manufactured by the employer ( s/w apps) to be very expensive. Just like car insdustry was taken over by japan and manufacturing was taken over by china the s/w industry should be taken over by India if we go by previous trends.
The middle layer is just doing billing between each other without any value addition. Most of the middle layer companies are run by the locals. So they are making money by adding cost to the end product without adding any significant value to the end product which in itself can't be sustained for too long. When this layer of fat is cut out the economy will be in more trouble.
Keeping the import laws (immigration laws) as it is would just make the cost of finished goods go up, the middle layer gets lazy everyday until one day they find that they no more have the employer nor the raw material here to continue making easy money by pushing paper.

Wake up people and stop pushing paper and start producing real stuff - This is for Lou Dobbs to tell his viewers

[somegchuh]

This is a very good post. The truth is software is inflated not just because middle layers (body shop/Lawyer/middle layer/approved vendor ...) hawking the services of H1B workers. There are several types of managers and analysts that add very little value to the actual product. This will cause software companies in the US to suffer in the future.

As for ppl stopping the paper-pushing ... I doubt if that will happen. Paper pushers are getting paid way more than the ppl who produce s/w. That is just plain sad. But wouldn't you rather get paid more and work less? :D

That having been said I don't think India is yet ready to take over the world of software product development. The analogy with automobile doesn't hold up well because software development is not at the point where it can be converted to factory level automation.

Most of the larger indian software outfits have focussed on taking over offshore projects and have invested very little in development and marketing of new products.

There is a tremendous opportunity to build software in India at a very low cost but I don't know how many startups would get funded by venture capitalists.

To make a long story short, the US economy is a consumer economy. So the people here should spend (consume goods and services ) to keep the economy in good shape. To spend they have to earn, to earn they have to produce some service or goods which has value. The banks and wall st firms produced worthless piles of paper ( e-documents) for decades to amass this false wealth for so long. Some call this whole thing a ponzi scheme and some call it economic depression.
But I think we EB aliens too have a part in this scheme. Skilled labor(skilled EB aliens) is a commodity which is imported into US. The buyer is the actual employer. In between these two there are many agents you can call themselves lawyers, body shopper, offshore agency, middle tier vendor, preferred vendor, etc, etc,. So between the buyer and the raw material (skilled EB worker) there are so many layers amounting to 50% of the cost. This in turn results in goods manufactured by the employer ( s/w apps) to be very expensive. Just like car insdustry was taken over by japan and manufacturing was taken over by china the s/w industry should be taken over by India if we go by previous trends.
The middle layer is just doing billing between each other without any value addition. Most of the middle layer companies are run by the locals. So they are making money by adding cost to the end product without adding any significant value to the end product which in itself can't be sustained for too long. When this layer of fat is cut out the economy will be in more trouble.
Keeping the import laws (immigration laws) as it is would just make the cost of finished goods go up, the middle layer gets lazy everyday until one day they find that they no more have the employer nor the raw material here to continue making easy money by pushing paper.

Wake up people and stop pushing paper and start producing real stuff - This is for Lou Dobbs to tell his viewers