conflux
Online Journalism Review
CanWest
Takes Tiered Approach to Pay Content at Canada.com
"Losing money online went out of vogue sometime around the spring of 2000, when the dot.com boom became the dot.bomb. While freebie-lovers everywhere have grimaced at the new tollbooths sprouting up at online content sites, the new reality is simple. We can no longer argue about whether people should pay for some content online; our arguments are limited to what they pay for and how ."
""There's no point in having canada.com with 120 million page views a month if nobody is paying for it," [Leonard Asper, president and CEO of Canadian media giant CanWest] said at a conference in September. "If we lose the page views, fine.""
redux [08.29.03]
"So our No. 1 concern -- the terrible fad from 2002 was that newspapers have said, "We have had enough of putting our stuff on the Internet for free, and although we have no real proof that we are hurting our circulation, we think that just from anecdotal evidence--that we are."
And so we had a situation in the newspaper industry where everybody was talking about putting their stuff behind a firewall. And I think the threat is pretty much over. We have seen fewer than 30 newspapers go up there and cut people off cold turkey ... because people who thought they could replicate the revenue that they were making from circulation by putting stuff up and charging people on the Web for it -- if they were not subscribers -- it has proved to be untrue."
redux [01.06.03]
"New research in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Sweden has revealed that 41 percent of European Internet users still refuse to pay for content on the Web. However, this figure has improved from 47 percent a year ago.
Moreover, research firm Jupiter has said that users who have a broadband connection are "significantly" more likely to pay for on-line content compared to those using dial-up. According to the firm, about 25 percent of broadband Internet users said they would pay for music over the Internet, compared to just 18 percent of narrowband (dial-up) users. Similarly, about 18 percent of broadband users claim they would be willing to buy video over the Web, compared to a mere 11 percent of dial-up subscribers."
redux [10.11.02]
"Over half of Europe will be online by 2007 according to a new survey but there are still question marks about what surfers will be prepared to buy on the net.
Jupiter Media's European Online survey revealed that by the end of 2002 only 10% of Europeans will have paid for content online."
redux [04.22.02]
[requires 'free' registration]
""The smarter bears in the bunch will be testing different products at different price points this year," she said, noting a recent Forrester survey indicating that one-third of Internet users would be willing to pay for online content next year.
But that means two-thirds of Internet users are not willing to pay for information or services online, which is why Ms. Allen stopped short of exhorting media executives to block off key areas of their Web sites immediately and start charging for entry. Rather, she said, media executives and others hoping to cash in on the subscription trend "have to start acting less like a media company and more like a retailer.""
redux [03.19.02]
"To online publishing and entertainment firms looking to start charging for their content, there was a simple message from today's Jupiter Media Forum: Don't hold your breath."
"Seventy percent of online adults surveyed by Jupiter, he said, can't understand why anyone would pay for any online content.
"If anything, people are less willing to pay than they were 18 months ago," he said."
"As some of you will be aware, I'm a major critic of 'negative' subscription models. Time and time again we have witnessed websites introduce subscription services that represent nothing more than a closure of existing content.
There are a few exceptions - one being the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) whose subscription model is to my mind flawless. They kept their exist proposition entirely unchanged and brought in a high quality advanced option designed perfectly to cater for a specific sector of their audience. Furthermore they have undertaken to continuously improve the subscriber experience, aggressively seeking user feedback.
IMDB and others have demonstrated that you can introduce a subscription service in a positive manner, and succeed, so why don't more websites follow their example?"
redux [01.15.01]
"As Microsoft, along with everyone else, wrestles with the challenge of how to make money on the Internet, you cannot help but wonder if Bill Gates & Co. regret a pivotal decision in the evolution of the Web.
When Microsoft decided in 1995 to make Internet Explorer and fold it into Windows, the action more than any other may have cemented the concept of OfreeO on the Internet."
"Microsoft won the browser wars but in so doing indelibly emblazoned in usersO minds the conviction that nothing on the Internet should cost money."
"Back when I did direct marketing, we were well-aware that people were irrational about pricing. The only way to really find out the right price for a product -- especially an information-based product, for which prices can be so arbitrarily set -- was to test a few, by sending different offers to random samplings, and see which resulted in more profit. Actually, it would be unusual if more than one (or any) of the prices produced any profit at all. And the results were all over the map. A higher price could sometimes bring in not just more money, but more orders, because of the increased perceived value. Then again, a price 20% lower could increase sales by 100%. You could guess but never know, and you were often surprised.O
redux [11.23.01]
"While the concept of e-publishing (as most people think of the term; in the strictest sense, everything on the Web could qualify as e-publishing) hasn't exactly set the world on fire, it is still the 'early days.' And like so many things on the Web, is still sorting out its proper place and 'mode of delivery.' The following sites reveal four different approaches to e-publishing - and whether through odd coincidence or 'environmental compulsion,' each one parallels a familiar method of software distribution."
"I've been listening to online-news people talk about it with much interest ever since I was laid off 6 months ago as the managing editor of a regional news site for an Internet Industry portal. Most of the old pros say it won't work. The consultants say about the same thing. The Suits? Well, they just don't say.
Yet, people have paid for print newspapers for ages and they don't seem to mind. So what's so different about online-news?
At this point, I think that online-news users have to pay, it's as simple as that."
"The Web's great free-for-all is coming to a sudden, sharp end. Under today's market conditions, Web companies can no longer expect to sustain themselves by losing ever-larger sums of money to gain ever-larger slices of market share. As more traditional business yardsticks take hold, many companies face the difficult decision to charge for some of their online content and servicesNand users have begun to accept that they can no longer get everything they want or love for free.
Sure, the Web continues to offer a vast, unprecedented array of gratismaterial. But professionally produced sites need to pay their bills, and relying on advertising alone is a risky proposition in an economic slump. As senior vice president of editorial operations for Salon.com , I've become very familiar with these realities. For content sites like Salon.com, charging for subscriptionsNonce considered anathema on the WebNis now an essential move for survival."
6:46 PM
0 comments
Mindjack
Deconstructing Knowledge
"So the [ Chief Knowledge Officers ] will learn that information has to be tailored far more carefully than they had anticipated. What few of them see coming is that only one presently available tool can do that tailoring: the human brain."
"At the last they will turn to the idea of hiring humans to tweak content and even storage structure. The benefits of this will be difficult to measure, and the organization that flies by the theory "you cannot manage what you cannot measure" will drive itself crazy. Organizations that settle for a more rational "you cannot manage what you do not understand" will do better."
redux [11.19.01]
"Inside of corporations a weblog can be used in a knowledge management or market intelligence function. Every work group seems to have someone on the team who just sends links around via email to all the other people he or she works with. In an environment like that if you give them a weblog and all the sudden the resources start really working for you. Pretty soon everyone wants a weblog to share a resource they found and to annotate useful ways in which that resource can be used by the team."
"A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that. It's better to have people write publicly."
redux [11.05.01]
"One of the major problems with expert communities, according to Snowden, is that they train behaviour and prevent innovation. Encouraging multiple informal communities throughout the company is a critical step toward innovation, he said.
"Identify people with like interests and pull them together. Allow people to cluster and form communities, then reinforce the ones you want." Snowden said. "Informal communities keep organisations together and make things work.""
redux [10.17.01]
"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."
"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"
redux [07.16.01]
"A recent study by market-research firm Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don't."
"Harry Bruce, associate dean of the University of Washington's Information School, said knowledge sharing is important because information has value in and of itself in our society."
""Clearly, we're increasingly becoming aware of the complexities of trying to share and transfer information and expertise within organizations and between organizations," he said."
"People constantly exchange information, the raw material of knowledge, with co-workers, business partners and customers... but they do it using personal, unstructured tools such as email. Wouldn't it be nice if companies could benefit from their own collective intelligence? Despite this appealing premise, years of knowledge management (KM) implementations have produced mixed results."
"The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the hubris of modernism: the belief we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. It's time for postmodern knowledge management."
"Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that worked at cross-purposes with human nature. Instead, it operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. In the end, postmodern knowledge management isn't about management at all, because management implies external control. The goal of postmodern KM is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people."
redux [06.12.01]
"Within IBM, there's an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.
In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."
redux [05.28.01]
""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."
7:07 PM
0 comments
News.Com
New data
says there's lots of new data
"On Monday, researchers at the University of California evaluated, and contributed to, the information glut with the release of their report "How Much Information? 2003," which pegs the quantity of new information stored in 2002 at 5 exabytes, or 5 quintillion bytes.
That, said researchers at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, amounts to the print collections of the Library of Congress--500,000 times over."
redux [10.19.00]
"ALREADY drowning in too much information? At least you can now find out precisely how much you are missing: about two exabytes. (An exabyte is roughly a billion times a billion bytes, or the quivalent of about 20 billion copies of The Economist). This is the estimated amount of unique information the world is currently producing each year. At least, it is the figure calculated by a group of researchers at the School for Information Systems and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian.
Estimating the world's information output appears a rather superfluous undertaking. But soon, the authors of the study point out, it will be technologically possible for an average person to obtain access to virtually all recorded information."
"The second striking fact is the ``democratization of data.'' A vast amount of unique information is created and stored by individuals. Original documents created by office workers are more than 80% of all original paper documents, while photographs and X-rays together are 99% of all original film documents. Camcorder tapes are also a significant fraction of total magnetic tape storage of unique content, with digital tapes being used primarily for backup copies of material on magnetic drives.
"This democratization of data is quite remarkable. A century ago the average person could only create and access a small amount of information. Now, ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially, publish it to the world via the Internet, if they choose to do so."
"This is an important milestone, says David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. "It's a sea change in how human beings deal with one another. It's no longer a question of access to information, but the challenge of weeding through to find what you need.""
""We have to be a lot more attentive to how well information is designed," Lyman says. "Until now, we've thought of information in the context of the medium it's stored in. Now we'll start to think of the medium in the context of how it's used.""
"When people think about computers, they often think about information. They talk about information technology, the information age, the information superhighway. They discuss how computers enable people to send, access, and manipulate information in many new ways."
"But this focus on information is limiting and distorting. If we want to take full advantage of new computational technologies, and if we want to help people become better thinkers and learners, we need to move beyond these information-centric views of computing and learning."
8:14 PM
0 comments
MSNBC
Who needs radio
anymore?
"With Apple's Internet downloading service, iTunes, now available for PC users, and Napster back up and running, there is a library of music available out in cyberspace, that has nothing to do with AM or FM or what you hear while channel surfing in your car. With a virtual jukebox of music at your fingertips why would anyone tune in to their local radio station, where a limited play list, abundance of commercials and cookie-cutter deejays flood the airwaves.
Well, with the exception of being stuck in your car, without a CD or cassette player, there doesn't seem to be much reason to tune in."
redux [04.24.03]
"Internet radio has found a niche. Lots of them, in fact."
"More than 100 million listeners have tried Web radio and the number of regular monthly listeners has tripled in the last three years, according to rating agency Arbitron (http://www.arbitron.com)."
""What consumers go online to listen to and what works best is content they can't listen to through traditional sources," says Bill Rose, general manager of Arbitron Internet Broadcast Services."
redux [11.20.02]
"A recent MeasureCast study shows that time spent listening to online radio has jumped 159 percent since last year.
Blame it on the demise of Napster, which means one less centralized location to download free music. Or chalk it up to improved broadband technology that makes streaming music sound almost like its traditional radio cousin. Whatever the reason, it's good news for some of the world's largest channels."
redux [10.01.02]
"Radio execs share an almost palpable tenet that holds that radio is bulletproof. They see the medium as we see cockroaches and Twinkies: indestructible.
Jim Boyle, a Wall Street analyst for Wachovia Securities, moderated the panel at which Reese spoke. He comes from a family that's been in the radio business for 45 years, and he summed up this particular philosophy nicely when he told me: "Radio is 82 years young. It has survived a lot of new media, survived a lot of different options inside the car space: you've had CB radios, you've had cassettes, you've had eight-track cartridges, you've had six- and now 10-CD changers in the trunk. You've had satellite radio that's shown up ... so it does seem to be a situation where 10 years from now, 20 years from now, there's still gonna be radio."
In their "experiments," radio execs have starved their stations of manpower and research and music testing and polluted them with extra commercials and digital disc jockeys. They're betting it will all work out just fine."
6:04 PM
0 comments
News.Com
Who wins
in offshoring?
"Despite the growing backlash over shipping American IT jobs to less-expensive overseas firms, the practice is necessary to help U.S. companies remain competitive, said a Department of Commerce representative here on Tuesday."
""A lot of analysts' reports about offshore outsourcing are overblown," Miller told panel attendees Tuesday. "They all have their own agenda.""
redux [10.23.03]
"In this way, offshoring, far from being bad for the United States, creates net value for the economy. It directly recaptures 67 cents of every dollar of spending that goes abroad and indirectly might capture an additional 45 to 47 cents--producing a net gain of 12 cents to 14 cents for every dollar of costs moved offshore.
The total possible wealth creation does not, of course, ease the plight of people who lose their jobs or find lower-wage ones."
redux [10.05.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The Labor Department, in its numerous surveys of employers and employees, has never tried to calculate this trade-off. But the "offshoring" of work has become so noticeable lately that experts in the private sector are now trying to quantify it.
By these initial estimates, at least 15 percent of the 2.81 million jobs lost in America since the decline began have reappeared overseas. Productivity improvements at home -- sustaining output with fewer workers -- account for the great bulk of the job loss. But the estimates being made suggest that the work sent overseas has been enough to raise the unemployment rate by four-tenths of a percentage point or more, to the present 6.1 percent."
redux [10.03.03]
"Employment in the US services sector has remained unchanged over the past 21 months as the economy has recovered; usually the services industry headcount has grown 5 per cent by this stage of the cycle. The employment growth is happening in India instead.
It is mostly a labour cost arbitrage play. An Indian PhD costs less than $US10,000 a year - 80 per cent below the starting salary of a similarly qualified person in the US. Indian universities are producing 2 million graduates a year, all of whom can speak perfect English."
""The market is booming. I can pick and choose a firm of my choice," said the 28-year-old engineer, who has been in the industry for about five years."
"India's software sector, including the back-office services industry, added 130,000 -- nearly 25 percent -- to its workforce in the year to March, taking the sector to 650,000. Wage costs are rising but are not yet a threat for a nation that churns out about 200,000 engineers per year, analysts say.""
redux [09.17.03]
"Despite the rhetoric from protesters and initial estimates from analysts, the long-term effects of sending jobs offshore may not be as devastating as they are made out to be. Some proponents believe that IT investments in other countries actually will lead to increased exports of computers and other equipment from the United States to help support other countries' burgeoning IT industries.
Deloitte Consulting's chief economist, Carl Steidtmann, recently released a position paper arguing that U.S. companies that outsource IT work will not only remain competitive, but also will have more money to invest in research and development.
A similar report from the McKinsey Global Institute concluded that the United States eventually captures between $1.12 and $1.14 for every dollar that a domestic company spends abroad."
redux [08.26.03]
"The wages that programmers are pulling down in New Delhi won't be paying for any Ford Explorers. Foreign workers often get wages and work in conditions that make America's early 20th-century sweatmills look good.
Instead, U.S. corporations are making lots of short-term cash by dumping larger salaries in favor of lower-paid workers in other countries. In this case, short-term cash couldn't be more shortsighted."
"Politicians in Washington should listen to Robert Perrucci, an author and sociology professor at Purdue University. Perrucci, who along with Earl Wysong wrote The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? , says we should tax companies for offshoring."
redux [07.17.03]
"Citing statistics from market research firms such as McKinsey, the body said the United States stands to save over $300 billion over the next six years by shifting some business operations overseas."
""US banks, financial services and insurance companies have saved $6 billion to $8 billion in the past four years owing to IT outsourcing to India," Nasscom claimed. "Helped by these savings, companies have prevented layoffs and instead added 125,000 more jobs.""
8:36 PM
0 comments
Wired News
Three R's: Reading, Writing, RFID
"Privacy experts expressed dismay at the idea of using RFID tags on children.
"I think the Buffalo experiment is getting children ready for the brave new world, where people are watched 24/7 in the name of security," said Richard Smith, an Internet privacy and security consultant. "My main concern is that once we start carrying around RFID-tagged items on our person such as access cards, cell phones, loyalty cards, clothing, etc., we can be tracked without our knowledge or permission by a network of RFID readers attached to the Internet.""
redux [10.13.03]
"Solusat, the Mexican distributor of the VeriChip -- a rice-size microchip that is injected beneath the skin and transmits a 125-kilohertz radio frequency signal -- is marketing the device as an emergency ID under its new VeriKid program."
""My big concern is that kidnappers will simply use 'high-tech' tools like knives to get rid of them," said Lauren Weinstein, creator of the Privacy Forum, an online digest related to privacy and technology issues."
redux [09.08.03]
"Worried parents will soon be able to keep an eye on their children at all times via a wearable tracking device and a website that maps where they go."
"Through the website parents will be able to pinpoint the location of their children in real time as well as replay where they have been over the last few hours."
redux [10.25.02]
"The maker of an implantable human ID chip has launched a national campaign to promote the device, offering $50 discounts to the first 100,000 people who register to get embedded with the microchip.
Applied Digital Solutions has coined the tagline "Get Chipped" to market its product, VeriChip."
"The company plans to develop a prototype for an implantable GPS ID chip by the end of the year."
redux [08.16.02]
"HILLARY CLINTON is supposed to have said of her husband that he was a "hard dog to keep on the porch". She is not alone. All over the world, dogs, husbands, children and even inanimate objects are liable to stray from the home--whether willingly or otherwise. Now, though, the technology exists to keep track of them."
"The angel is intended to look after old people who have become forgetful and young children who have become too adventurous, as well as dogs who are too interested in the bitch next door."
redux [02.26.02]
"A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person's skin. For airports, nuclear power plants and other high-security facilities, the immediate benefits would be a closer-to-foolproof security system. But privacy advocates warn that the chip could lead to encroachments on civil liberties.
THE IMPLANT TECHNOLOGY is another case of science fiction evolving into fact. Those who have long advanced the idea of implant chips say it could someday mean no more easy-to-counterfeit ID cards, no more reliance on dozing security guards."
redux [02.06.02]
""Derek stood up and said, 'I want to be the first kid to be implanted with the chip,'" Leslie Jacobs said. "For the next few days all he did was talk about the VeriChip.""
"ADS chief technology officer Keith Bolton said he was a bit wary about the family's motives at first, but the Jacobses quickly convinced him they'd be perfect subjects. Since the VeriChip was announced in December, the company has been bombarded with queries from people interested in the device, Bolton said.
"Right now we have over 2,000 kids who have e-mailed, wanting to have the chip implanted," he said. "They think it's cool.""
redux [12.04.00]
"Applied Digital Solutions is launching a new line of products under the "Digital Angel" name that allow the monitoring of a person's whereabouts and vital statistics."
"Although the devices may evoke images of George Orwell's Big Brother, the company says the products could be used to keep track of pets, small children or adults with health concerns such as Alzheimer's disease."
redux [09.07.00]
"Worry no more, doting parents! Whether it's your little pumpkin's first day walking home from school by herself or the millionth time you've lost her at the mall, the BabysitterTM will track your sweetpea's location from a jelly bean-sized microchip implant, discretely tucked under her collarbone. You'll be able to chart her every move. What better way to give her independence, and put your mind at ease?"
Also available: The Constant CompanionTM lets you keep a watchful eye on grandma or grandpa, even when you can't be by their side; The Invisible BodyguardTM offers freedom from fear so you can enjoy the fauna and foliage when eco-tourism takes you to kidnapping hot spots around the globe. Coming soon: The INS Border PatrollerTM; the Maximum Security GuardTM; the Personal Private EyeTM; the Micro-ManagerTM."
redux [09.03.00]
"WHAT can grease the slippery slope toward tyranny, and erode trust within families? Sometimes, it's as simple as parents' love for their children.
A colleague and friend says he'd gladly implant a location-tracking chip in his newborn daughter, to protect her from kidnapping and other threats. He says he wouldn't misuse such surveillance power. I'm sure he means it. I'm sure other parents would say, and believe, the same things.
This location-tracking product does not exist -- yet. Such is the race of technology, however, that it undoubtedly will exist soon enough. By then, I hope my colleague and others in his situation think hard about the consequences if they get what they want."
redux [07.17.00]
"Forget the pager number and don't bother calling.
One company is making it easier for folks to "track" anyone, by allowing them to pull up a map of the person's location on a personal digital assistant (PDA) or computer.
"Cell-Loc isn't the only company to come out with location-sensitive devices. After all, the industry is expected to bring in a whopping $3.9 billion by 2004, according to the Strategis Group.
The same Strategis study showed that people didn't mind being tracked down for emergency situations like roadside assistance."
redux [05.25.00]
"It could be getting harder to hide from the boss.
After allegations that some city employees are loafing on the job, Denver officials said Monday they want to spend $1.5 million to track city vehicles with the military's Global Positioning System satellites."
"One labor expert said it might be counterproductive for an employer to try to scrutinize its workers so closely."
redux [04.11.00]
"Johnny: "Mom! Grandma's missing again!"
Mom: "Don't worry, dear, the satellite will find her.""
"According to Reuters, a Japanese company has come up with a new way to track down grandmas, grandpas and anyone else who forgets where he or she is supposed to be, by using a satellite-based global positioning system and cellular technology."
7:10 PM
0 comments
Wired News
The Case for Coolie Labor
"Despite the growing backlash over shipping American IT jobs to less-expensive overseas firms, the practice is necessary to help U.S. companies remain competitive, said a Department of Commerce representative here on Tuesday."
""A lot of analysts' reports about offshore outsourcing are overblown," Miller told panel attendees Tuesday. "They all have their own agenda.""
redux [10.08.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
"Global companies have long taken advantage of India's large college-educated, low-cost work force. Now Wall Street firms, including J. P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, are joining the chase for more highly skilled Indian labor."
"This shifting of more sophisticated work to India comes on the heels of a rush of call center and other back-office nonmanufacturing jobs here, and is seen by many experts as yet another phase in the latest drift of jobs to low-cost countries that began in the early 1990's with Silicon Valley companies."
redux [10.05.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The Labor Department, in its numerous surveys of employers and employees, has never tried to calculate this trade-off. But the "offshoring" of work has become so noticeable lately that experts in the private sector are now trying to quantify it.
By these initial estimates, at least 15 percent of the 2.81 million jobs lost in America since the decline began have reappeared overseas. Productivity improvements at home -- sustaining output with fewer workers -- account for the great bulk of the job loss. But the estimates being made suggest that the work sent overseas has been enough to raise the unemployment rate by four-tenths of a percentage point or more, to the present 6.1 percent."
redux [10.03.03]
"Employment in the US services sector has remained unchanged over the past 21 months as the economy has recovered; usually the services industry headcount has grown 5 per cent by this stage of the cycle. The employment growth is happening in India instead.
It is mostly a labour cost arbitrage play. An Indian PhD costs less than $US10,000 a year - 80 per cent below the starting salary of a similarly qualified person in the US. Indian universities are producing 2 million graduates a year, all of whom can speak perfect English."
""The market is booming. I can pick and choose a firm of my choice," said the 28-year-old engineer, who has been in the industry for about five years."
"ndia's software sector, including the back-office services industry, added 130,000 -- nearly 25 percent -- to its workforce in the year to March, taking the sector to 650,000. Wage costs are rising but are not yet a threat for a nation that churns out about 200,000 engineers per year, analysts say.""
redux [09.17.03]
"Despite the rhetoric from protesters and initial estimates from analysts, the long-term effects of sending jobs offshore may not be as devastating as they are made out to be. Some proponents believe that IT investments in other countries actually will lead to increased exports of computers and other equipment from the United States to help support other countries' burgeoning IT industries.
Deloitte Consulting's chief economist, Carl Steidtmann, recently released a position paper arguing that U.S. companies that outsource IT work will not only remain competitive, but also will have more money to invest in research and development.
A similar report from the McKinsey Global Institute concluded that the United States eventually captures between $1.12 and $1.14 for every dollar that a domestic company spends abroad."
redux [09.01.03]
"In the end, like it or not, we here in the U.S. are going to have to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide IT economy. Some IT workers here may be forced to leave the "computer industry" and move into non-offshorable jobs, but this may not mean they give up doing computer work, because as our economy continues to shift away from manufacturing and toward services, we may see just as many non-portable IT "support" jobs created as we would if we decided our economic future was best served by trying to turn our economy back to its traditional dependence on manufacturing.
The upshot: Even though hundreds of thousands of programming and other IT jobs are likely to leave the U.S. over the next few decades, the vast majority of U.S. IT workers will survive, and possibly even prosper in the end, although they may have new employers and work in new fields."
redux [08.26.03]
"The wages that programmers are pulling down in New Delhi won't be paying for any Ford Explorers. Foreign workers often get wages and work in conditions that make America's early 20th-century sweatmills look good.
Instead, U.S. corporations are making lots of short-term cash by dumping larger salaries in favor of lower-paid workers in other countries. In this case, short-term cash couldn't be more shortsighted."
"Politicians in Washington should listen to Robert Perrucci, an author and sociology professor at Purdue University. Perrucci, who along with Earl Wysong wrote The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? , says we should tax companies for offshoring."
redux [08.13.03]
"Almost any professional job that can be done long-distance is suddenly up for grabs. Jobs done by financial analysts, architectural drafters, telemarketers, accountants, claims adjusters, home loan processors and others at higher levels of the labor food chain are being farmed out to workers in other countries.
"We're not just talking about call-center jobs, but all kinds of jobs," says Deloitte Consulting analyst Christopher Gentle. "It doesn't leave any part of the corporation untouched.""
redux [07.30.03]
"One out of 10 jobs in the U.S. computer services and software industry could shift to lower-cost emerging markets such as India or Russia by the end of 2004, a top computer consultancy said on Tuesday."
""Suddenly we have a profession -- computer programming -- that has to wake up and consider what value it really has to offer," Diane Morello, a Gartner vice president and research director who studies work force issues said in an interview."
redux [07.17.03]
"Citing statistics from market research firms such as McKinsey, the body said the United States stands to save over $300 billion over the next six years by shifting some business operations overseas."
""US banks, financial services and insurance companies have saved $6 billion to $8 billion in the past four years owing to IT outsourcing to India," Nasscom claimed. "Helped by these savings, companies have prevented layoffs and instead added 125,000 more jobs.""
redux [07.12.03]
"Laxmikant Purohit, a 34-year-old services manager at SoftTel Information Services who works from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., says he suffers from constipation and acid stomach. In the past eight months he has put on 29 pounds, he said.
"It's difficult to have a positive outlook toward life because everything seems dark and gloomy when you work at ungodly hours," he said. "It's the first month that is the most terrible. One or two weeks after joining, new recruits throw up in the middle of work.""
redux [07.08.03]
"There is no better form of trade a developing nation can engage in than to sell services provided by an educated population. Compare it to anything else a developing nation can sell -- natural resources like oil or minerals or agribusiness, hard labor in manufacturing, for instance -- and you'd probably find that white-collar jobs would be the most sustainable and most eco-friendly of any of them.
Those concerned about solving the world's problems should be falling over themselves to encourage developing nations to build a white-collar workforce, and to open that workforce to the world."
redux [07.03.03]
"Napier says that neither the bursting of the late-'90s tech bubble nor the doldrums of a poky recovery from the recession explain his layoff and ongoing unemployment. He places the blame for his woes on globalization: the double whammy of American companies flooding an already soft job market with foreign workers brought into the United States on H1-B visas while at the same time employing non-U.S. workers still in their home countries to write code or perform other high-tech services.
The latter practice, known as "outsourcing" or "offshoring" or even "near shoring" when it takes place in a neighboring country, is based on a simple economic rationale: Cut costs by sending work overseas to someone who will do it for less money."
redux [06.12.03]
"How efficient is it to pay a software engineer in the Valley a loaded salary of $170,000, the average salary reported in the fourth quarter of 2001, when Asian engineers provide a much better value? We've all read the cost differentials between US and Indian, Vietnamese and Chinese workers. And one of the main reasons this work went overseas is because clients knew they were being gouged by US engineers and consultants. After all, programming is, essentially, production work. And is labor not the most expensive variable component of a software product?
It's easy to recognize that we're witnessing the demise of an industry that had a nice run in the Valley."
"India has warned the US and other developed countries that if they limit the extent to which information technology is outsourced it will damage their domestic industry.
"India's Information Technology Secretary Rajiv Ratan Shah said outsourcing was a huge international movement and that it was unstoppable."
"U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft are already exploring countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, says a report from research firm IDC. The new destinations include Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
As a result, India, which some have blamed for the loss of American jobs, may soon lose jobs itself."
redux [11.27.02]
"The export of IT jobs from America to English-speaking Third World countries is a worrying new trend. First predicted more than a decade ago in Ed Yourdon's book ``The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,'', Yourdon went on to suggest that American programmers could avoid unemployment by becoming more productive with the help of software tools. His identification of the trend was correct, but his solution was wrong."
"The export of IT jobs has a permanent vicious cycle effect. As the jobs migrate, there are more and more unemployed people chasing fewer opportunities here."
7:10 PM
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CIO
The
Copyright Cuffs
"A couple of years ago I was talking with a law school colleague about cyberlaw and the people who study it. "I've always wondered," he said, "why all the cyberprofs hate copyright."
I don't actually hate copyright, and yet I knew just what he meant. Almost all those who self-identify as cyberspace law scholars agree that copyright law is a big mess. So far as I can tell, federal courts experts don't reject or loathe our system of federal courts, and criminal law experts split every which way on the overall virtue of the criminal justice system. So what's with cyberprofs' uniform discontent about copyright?"
redux [01.16.03]
[requires 'free' registration]
"The Supreme Court's decision to uphold a 20-year extension on the copyright term handed a major victory to the entertainment and publishing industries, which stand to make billions of dollars by keeping control over lucrative properties for up to 95 years.
But the public domain advocates who had challenged the constitutionality of the 1998 law might claim a measure of success in the court of public opinion."
"It has often been said that movements gain by losing in the Supreme Court. Some feminists say it would have been better to lose Roe, because that would have built a movement in response. I have often wondered whether it would ever be possible to lose a case and yet smell victory in the defeat. I'm not yet convinced it's possible. But if there is any good that might come from my loss, let it be the anger and passion that now gets to swell against the unchecked power that the Supreme Court has said Congress has. When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phillis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, "this makes no sense," then it makes no sense. Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not."
redux [08.15.02]
"Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.
Things are different now, [different] from even when Walt produced the Walt Disney Corporation. In this year now, we have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying. You know the things that computers do when you boot them up? Going from copies to, not just copies of the original work, but even derivative works on top of it. Going from 14 years for new works produced by a real author--there are fewer and fewer of those people out there--to life plus 70 years. That's the expansion of law, but also there's been an expansion of control through technology."
redux [07.25.02]
"This simplistic notion of what copyright is and how people think about it is weakening the debate substantially. We need to be much more aggressive in calling people on this rhetoric, because it's just wrong. It's just not the case that copyright has ever been understood to mean that if you use a copyrighted work in a way unintended by the copyright owner that's "theft." Much more fundamentally, who are the real thieves out there? The public domain was supposed to be fed with new work beginning in 1998 that's been taken away from the public. It's been taken away by Congress legislating to extend the terms of existing copyrights. I think that is theft from the public as much as there is theft going on in other contexts. Now, that's not to say there isn't theft going on. I think piracy is horrendous. But in this moment of transition between the past and the future, we've got to allow new systems to develop in a way that we can evaluate what is going to make sense and what isn't. Then we can worry about enforcing laws against "theft.""
redux [05.13.02]
"A new politics of intellectual property is needed to counteract the content industry's drive toward ever stronger rights. More importantly, a broader awareness is needed that copyright deeply affects the information environment for us all. The digital networked environment has surely changed the economics of production of intellectual property (e.g., the marginal cost of copying is effectively zero), the economics of distribution (e.g., the cost of transmission via the Internet is also effectively zero), and the economics of publication (e.g., posting information on the web is also radically cheaper than in the print environment). This means, among other things, that the actions of individuals can have the same potential market-destructive impact as those of commercial counterfeiters in the olden days. This helps to explain why the content industries have been so anxious about computers and why they favor moving to a pay-per-use or mandated trusted system policy for all commercially valuable information in digital form. Without imaginative proposals for more balanced solutions and without a political movement to support and sustain such proposalsNin other words, without a new politics of intellectual propertyNthere will be little to stop the current politics from having its high protectionist way."
redux [04.08.02]
"Nearly a century ago, the music industry argued that its future was threatened by a new method of creating and distributing multiple copies of a performed song.
The new technology? The player piano roll."
"Throughout history, new technologies -- from the Gutenberg printing press to Napster -- have posed a threat to the owners and creators of music, movies, books and other artistic works. Those publishers, writers, artists and other owners of copyrighted work have always responded with lawsuits and calls for stronger laws."
redux [03.12.02]
"Copyright was invented by and for early capitalism, and its importance to that system has grown ever since. To oppose copyright is to oppose capitalism. Thus, Marxism is a natural starting point when challenging copyright. Marx's concept of a 'general intellect', suggesting that at some point a collective learning process will surpass physical labour as a productive force, offers a promising backdrop to understand the accomplishments of the free software community. Furthermore, the chief concerns of hacker philosophy, creativity and technological empowerment, closely correspond to key Marxist concepts of alienation, the division of labour, deskilling, and commodification. At the end of my inquiry, I will suggest that the development of free software provides an early model of the contradictions inherent to information capitalism, and that free software development has a wider relevance to all future production of information."
redux [12.21.01]
"If intellectual "property" were morally indistinguishable from tangible property--as copyright holders suggest when they equate infringement with theft--there would be nothing wrong with a perpetual copyright. We take it for granted that ownership of a house or a diamond ring does not simply expire after a set number of years and that such assets can be passed on to descendants indefinitely.
A song, a movie, or a book is not quite the same, as the very existence of the Copyright Clause suggests. The Framers did not give Congress the power to grant people rights to their homes, farms, or personal possessions because such rights already existed."
"Copyrights, by contrast, were understood to be a legal invention, and the justification for them was utilitarian: to promote progress and enrich the culture by giving authors an additional incentive to create. But the Framers recognized that copyrights could also impede progress and impoverish the culture by preventing people from building on the work of others."
redux [10.15.01]
""Content": in the modern lexicon, the term denotes everything from the information delivered daily to our doors on newsprint to the multimedia clips streamed over the Internet; from the music carried on the airwaves to the interactive software on CD-ROMs. This so-called content is produced by an increasingly broad and diverse segment of the economy, including not just writers and artists, but also software programmers and other high-tech researchers who create new intellectual property.
And here's the most interesting part. Time and again, the distributors - such as publishers, broadcasters and record labels - recoil in the face of technological advances that could diminish their role."
redux [08.03.01]
"Many of the voices in online debates around IP fall into one of two camps. I won't take the time to do more than very briefly summarize these two positions, because we're all familiar with them by now. The first is the "information wants to be free" camp, which advocates the free and communal sharing of information and rejects any notion that products of the intellect can or should be understood, legally or philosophically, as property. At the other extreme is a camp that is comfortable drawing direct, strong analogies between concepts of ownership of physical property and concepts of ownership of intellectual property. Furthermore, this camp is intent on letting the "free" market determine a value for information, much as it determines a value for more traditional types of property. This second camp usually feels that the anti-IP rhetoric coming from the first camp is merely a rationale for piracy, while the first camp feels that members of the second are mindless shills for the corporate machine.
Somewhere in between these two extremes lies a large majority who find both extremes attractive for different reasons, but who can't in good conscience commit to one stance or the other."
redux [07.13.00]
"The struggle over monetizing the digital economy is now a war, if we follow the rhetoric of its leaders. The battle over music and movies is inspiring Charlton Heston-like images, most recently from Edgar Bronfman, head of Universal Studios (whose last widely distributed quote came years ago when he declared the Internet the "CB radio of the "90s"), in a speech at Real Conference 2000 in May."
""I am warring against the culture of the Internet, threatening to depopulate Silicon Valley as I move a Roman legion or two of Wall Street lawyers to litigate in Bellevue and San Jose," Bronfman said. "I have moved these lawyers - not to attack the Internet and its culture, but for its benefit and to protect it."
Bronfman justified his fight as defense of his "intellectual property rights," and those of creators everywhere. "You own a home. You own a car. They're yours - they belong to you. Well, your ideas belong to you, too. And "intellectual property" is property, period." In pursuit of pirates, he said, "we must restrict the anonymity behind which people hide."
"The semantics of the issues intrigue me, and came to my attention through Richard Stallman, who suggests that terminology is a foundation for our ideas, and that words such as consumer, protection, piracy, and intellectual property reinforce faulty premises."
redux [02.05.00]