Global Village or Not?

The promise of the Internet Economy was that large corporate entities no longer had to be tied to one particular physical locations. There could be telecommuting, working on the road, from home, whatever. Thanks to email, cheap long distance and instant messaging, what's to stop companies from going virtual? Now that the U.S. government has broken down many trade barriers, the "giant sucking sound" is indeed happening for jobs -- but not only to Mexico as Ross Perot had predicted. India is becoming a high-tech center for U.S. jobs, and "offshore outsourcing" is becoming more than a trend.

Funny how politicians are now lining up to try to stop it. They were the ones kowtowing to corporate calls for more high-tech workers abroad in the boom. Now those loose policies are hitting home for programmers who are losing their jobs to lower cost workers in India and elsewhere. This move by PeopleSoft is just more of the same. You want a global village without boundaries? Then expect workers to get paid a "global wage" adjusted for all the poor developing countries' economic standards. And eventually prices should also go down to those lower global levels, too, right? Uh, right?

If politicos really did want protectionism to end, then they're getting it in spades. In less than 10 years, we've gone from a crisis in not having enough U.S. programmers, to telling kids not to study programming (unless they want to move to India). Weird.

Posted by markglaser, February 17, 2004 08:25 PM | | TrackBack