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Red Alert Special: Microsoft starts high level of financial subsidization in India, fostering Indian R&D, and investing in Indian computer education, rather than investing in American Software Developers (read news article for background on the $1.7 Billion over four year Microsoft investment) >

THE CHAIRMAN'S RESPONSE: This is the full text of Co-Chairman Dr. Jack A. Shulman speaking in reply to Bill Gate's announcement that Microsoft is investing $1.7 Billion in Indian Programmers and R&D, along with expanding computer competency training for schools in India. Dr. Shulman has been programming since the 1960's. He represents the public interest as Chairman of the Board of "the Advocacy", a commission at the American Computer Science Association Inc. which engages efforts in support of the common good of the public and of the computer industry. Dr. Shulman is also head of CompAmerica, a small computer company, which holds no financial interest in nor receives any compensation from this website. This article represents the Co-Chairman's opinion, is neither agreed with nor disagreed with by the ACSA.

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Dr. Shulman to Mr. William Gates, Chairman, Microsoft:
(during the weekly 'Briefing on advances in Software Development', December 8, 2005)

(continuing...)
“I’m not against helping India.  However, nearly 18-20% of America is at or below the poverty line.  The American educational system, once among the best in the world, now thrives at the collegiate level by importing students from other lands where there is American Aid and the investments of folks like Bill. That AID and those investments have fostered better early years comp sci schooling and better students abroad than we find here at home.  It’s frightening to us, the shortsightedness that is demonstrated by those who run the Department of Commerce with their ‘outsourcing conferences’ aimed at convincing American business at worsening the Trade Deficit.  They are literally mortgaging our children’s future and giving our children nothing in return but ‘Hey, hey, hey: Globalization is underway!’ – the consequences from which they barely understand, yielding short term earnings gain and a long term drain on what's available in America to forward thinking workers. It subsidizes labor in those lands where the economic differences and exchange rates conspire to make American thinking workers look unaffordable.”

“However: when Microsoft sets that kind of a ‘cheaper by the dozen outsourced workers’ role model for the rest of IT America, I’m shocked and disgusted. It’s not that Bill should know better: he does.  Yet this is what the very industry that gave Bill his job gets for three decades of support for Microsoft: a betrayal to the tune of, in the long term, nearly 50,000 jobs and hundreds of thousands of new Indian students learning to program Microsoft systems, while America continues to lag way behind educationally, all for lack of support from companies like Microsoft who set an example by investing in other nations. As a result, America has neither the educators nor the curricula to engage in modernizing student compsci educations, and American thinking workers lose their jobs to inferior quality workmanship. They don’t teach C#, J++ or .NET enough in American high schools. They could if they had the money. They can’t afford to train the teachers to teach it!  And if Microsoft started turning their attention to American students as visibly as it is cow-towing to the Indians (pardon my pun), others would follow. We in the American Business Community somehow miss the point, misguided as we are by business’s oil industry dominated mind-set of band-aid economic fixes/firefighting and globalization.  That Billion Seven should have gone to American Schools to modernize programming courses for OUR children, and to build American based, American staffed R&D at Microsoft in Redmond, Santa Clara, Hillsborough or Raleigh, not to India for heaven’s sakes!  We have to fix our problems here at home, FIRST, before we ever go out offshore shopping the way Bill did yesterday!”

 “As the cost of living has deepened in America, thanks largely to the cost of energy, it has become impossible for American Programmers to accept cut-rate pay to compete with $5000-a-year Indian developers.  To penalize them for that, when you are the largest, most powerful and most profitable Software Company in America and on Earth, is in my mind, cruelty and bereft of social responsibility.  To begin with, the established American software industry represents more experience than the amateurish beginners, the standard of judging by education level long since failed our industry - it's those who've programmed longer and harder who have the greater ability to compute, far more so than those who bear more credentials - because in each area of expertise, operating systems, languages, applications, databases, the American programmer has been adapting skills that are simply not available to book educated Indians.  It's like comparing A.J. Foyt to an Indian Citizen who learned to drive from a book and a quick run down in the school parking lot.  Besides: who else has been supporting Bill Gates since day one?  The propaganda is hypocrisy: Bill would have us buy the perception that Indian software developers are better than we are.  That's nonsense - just look at their work - shoddy, incomplete, and minimal - they overrationalize and over justify everything, don't even begin to understand the practical world of computer sci, and haven't the experience in real world situations to understand the purpose for what they are coding.  Bright people, yes.  Brilliant programmers? That is absolute nonsense, totally incorrect.  From what I’ve seen, they talk a very good game, but they do not have the kind of experience the professional American programmer does and their software reflects it."

  "Look at the history of IBM's OS/2 Warp, built largely in the IBM Golden Enclave Lab in Bangalore.  It reflects programming styles and sensibilities that were completely rejected by the market.  Later, IBM picked an Indian company to write a pen-like Interface for it and AIX, which my firm a half decade ago had offered to do in six months with six programmers, and we've NEVER missed a deadline we were responsible for proposing in all of 35 years.  The Indian firm bid 3 months and 3 programmers.  By the time two years rolled around, IBM had racked up a bill with that Indian firm of nearly $2,000,000 and they weren't even 1/5th the way there.  They never finished the project.  Meanwhile, we'd done two complete Tablet PC, OCR and Pen Recognition systems for two clients, which today are thriving products.  That's quite typical of the value of Indian Programmers.   Most of the time the Indian Software Community seems geared to driving up the cost of a contract to the client after it’s signed, while driving down the cost to the Indians of fulfilling it.  They are much better at business negotiation than technology.  Yet big companies like IBM, who hang their hats on the idea of saving money through offshore labor, once fooled, are never willing to admit having made a big mistake.  When it comes to provision of tech support, from what we have seen at Microsoft, with the rare exception, their offshore Indian contingent generally do nothing as help desk personnel, largely dismissing all claims of problem, with an email that says: 'If you have any more questions, email our system, COMPASS...' without doing anything at all to solve a reported problem.  Because the average Indian programmer only cost $5000-15000 a year plus overheads, they get hired, even though they never seem to produce more than about 5% to 10% of what an average skilled American programmer delivers.  You simply get less than what you pay for from India and less than the proportionate delivery from the American programmer.  That is, unless you set your standards very, very low.”

 Dr. Shulman continued: “At the present rate of declining Corporate support for the American software professional, as many get wealthy as intermediary brokers of cheap Indian Software Labor,  we can assume that within 10 years if something is not done to reverse the trend, the programming of computers will be a lost art in America.  The art and science of Software Development is a Critical Infrastructure Mandate in any super power's private arsenal.  The only outlets will be for shareware with no one really wanting to pay for that.  Microsoft will probably have expanded from India to Romania and Russia and globalized, only to discover that its earnings like GM before it are declining, so it will likely pass those costs on to the consumer and business customers with steadily rising O/S and Office Software cost. Its headquarters will probably be in Geneva, Switzerland. By then it is likely that nearly 33% of all Americans will be at or below the poverty line. The science of computer science could conceivably continue to deteriorate in America to the point where it becomes nothing more than about “how to use a PC and the Internet”.  Eventually, no software jobs will be available to Americans at all.  Software Education and American Programmers will be thought of as too costly, so Colleges here probably won’t even offer it any more: there will be no business grants available, as companies like Microsoft pour more and more money into a deeply worsening Trade Deficit abroad, continuing to think they’re saving when they are not.  What I am predicting here is something I do not want to come to pass, for the future is ALL ABOUT SOFTWARE and he who produces it, controls the future of history.”

“ With Software a dying art in America, by that time, new software advances will have to come from abroad, where there is a singular lack of such creativity as runs rampant in America. Perhaps it is the independent American spirit that scares Mr. Gates.  As he reaches his elderly years, assuming he continues along this path, it is becoming increasingly likely that he will be remembered not for having popularized Windows but for building a company whose systems just barely work, is thought of as predatory towards others and whose business investments unwisely went abroad and resulted in an irreconcilable brain and trade deficit.   His friendly, smiling ‘Mr. Spock’ Star Trek image of the 80’s, now replaced in 2005 by more of a “Mr. Bill” in sweater and slacks or a pin-stripe business suit, could shortly be replaced by a very unfriendly ‘Wrath of Khan’ character if there is backlash, Bill seemingly having betrayed the US Software Industry.  Microsoft’s disdainful choice to abandon the American Software Industry in lieu of investment abroad is in my opinion, so remarkably nearsighted that I have come to conclude that Bill Gates' massive investment in India represents a very serious change of direction for his company.  By doing so, Microsoft has apparently traded innovation and empowerment, for a superficially cheapened technological solution and even cheaper technological solution providers. That runs against everything Bill has spoken publicly about Microsoft since 1995 and before, about Innovation, Empowerment and Advancing the State of Software.” 

 “I am forced to reply to Bill, my 35 years of software development experience bringing my tone of voice nearly to anger: what’s wrong with American Programmers, American R&D and American Students?  Shame on you, Bill Gates!”

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Dr. Shulman's earlier in the week presentation
to the ACSA League of Distinguished Software Professionals:

"I was asked what I thought of this development, Microsoft investing nearly $1.7 Billion in emerging Indian Software Development Infrastructure, Facilities, Programmers and Students.  I was startled by the seemingly callous way Bill responded to inquiries from the American Press. I would have to say to Bill Gates the following:"

"What's wrong with American Programmers, American Students and American Labor, Mr. Gates? We really don't want to hear about Microsoft's so-called 'priorities', we really don't want to hear about any more Public Library's you've given PCs to. There are TENS OF THOUSANDS of us: top quality talent programmers who could program RINGS around our Indian 'competition', out of work right now, thanks largely to your company, Bill Gates.  Your American initiatives to encourage ISVs and support expansion from older technologies to Windows Server 2003/2005 and .NET have not yet achieved their potential, largely because there is no readily available documentation nor readily available and affordable education on this technology.  But rather than backfill the enormous gap it's created in producing these new technologies, Microsoft seems to think it should ignore the American Software Industry and American Educational system, that India is a better investment. American schools badly need money to teach programming, schools by the hundreds, even thousands."

"You know, I can remember when We gave YOU your job, Bill.  I can remember when you were, in essence, Ed Robert's company mascot, he patterned 'Micro-kid' after you, an enthusiastic young microcomputer addicted post teen who was unhappy with college and who simply loved to hack around with those little 8080 based computers. You were working in Paul Allen's starboard shadow while he was at Honeywell, back then, and out of that came Microsoft, with some commercial languages like Basic and Business Cobol. However, you didn't invent Windowing, William, it was quite literally handed you on a silver platter in the early to mid 80's by IBM who got the idea from some 'unknown programmer' who wrote a windowed system for a NY Bank and that bank decided to standardize on that kind of interface since it was so 'user friendly' and configurable to all applications. All these years I and everyone else in the industry have been taking the heat and pulling for you, Bill.  We've been hunkering down and backing you every step of the way, watching the controversy and supporting you by selling your products for you, installing your products for you, repairing your products for you, reporting the bugs, and waiting for the fixes, and with a very straight face, decrying the competition and promoting the Microsoft approach as 'the wave of the future now, the right way to go.' This industry has made you practically the wealthiest man on earth! Yet, on December 7, 2005 you rewarded me and everyone else in the software community who've been supporting you and your firm, by giving another 5000 or so of our jobs, jobs we created together, away to Indian Citizens without so much as a second thought, simultaneously expanding your capacity to hire more Indian Citizens and fostering schools to teach Indian Children to write and think Microsoft?  That reeks of betrayal, Bill. It's on a par with IBM and Standard Oil backing the rise of Adolph Hitler's conquest of Europe and murder of the Jews.  Microsoft is apparently trying to bury its obligation to the Industry that helped create it: somehow de-rating it by investing in another country's labor pool so as to apparently instigate a conflict of Indian thinking worker vs. American thinking worker, just as Standard Oil thought to create a competition that elevated the demand for its products by helping Germany design and build Nazi-ism so as to create what ultimately became World War II. I'm sorry, Bill, but I see a parallel of methods, here, a failure by Microsoft to take responsibility and take on social responsibility here in America. That Billion Seven would have been way better spent on American Schools: teaching C Sharp and J++ and .NET to American High School and College Students and fostering American Software Workshops and software development colloquia!  But in India, you don't have to worry about Anti-Trust, do you, Bill (and behind you, Sam Palmisano)?What have you done for us, lately Bill?  Introduce 64 Bit Windows?  What 64 Bit Windows?  The one languishing on the shelves as Vista looms larger and larger?  And here we sit in this industry, all of us stunned that you are way fonder of what India has to offer than the very strained backs of the very people here in the US who've been carrying you on those backs for nearly two decades.  Will we be making bricks without straw, Bill, as well?"

"You want to know what's wrong with this Country?  It's YOU, Bill, YOU and every other IT Manager and CTO who shops for programmers and technology builders abroad trying to translate cheap labor pools into expanded ESOPs. Respectfully I could NOT even exclude President Bush from this complaint, if the President thinks off-shoring is a good idea.  Without Computer Science Competency from the ground up across the board, future American Workers aren't going to be worth MINIMUM WAGE!  Yet you've misled them into wrong-thinking with a bunch of AIRHEAD TV EXECUTIVES and loser RAP / ROCK Recording Executives who fill their young 5-25 year old gullible child-minds with nonsense that makes getting an education something that's for 'Geeks', earning an honest living something that's for 'loser grownups', senior citizens as 'old wrinkly things they put in Nursing Homes' and aspiring to be the head of a major software company for 'college drop outs with a narcissistic megalomania complex'! They feed them the 'live hard, get high, die young' drivel, and the same garbage shows up in your XBOX 360 and other gaming systems that suggests that life is about 'killing the alien/foreign enemy and then you die, come back later to do it all over again.'  Or what about 'driving Daddy's gift Mustang at 180 miles per hour through downtown NYC, Chicago and LA for a spin'? Brilliant, Bill, that's what we need, another Gaming System that's about Popcorn + Cocaine + underage Girls who from experience know what the code phrase 'Salad Bowl' means! When we buy labor abroad to compensate we contribute triple to the overall Trade Deficit, each dollar represents both a dollar we spent abroad and a dollar's worth of labor lost here at home, and another dollar for a family that won't be spent on a quality education.  Eventually, the spiritual decline of an industry forces us into total addiction dependency on foreign labor, without which WE can't survive.  And the vicious cycle continues as Kids have no idea who even Dwight D. Eisenhower was, or what a Nobel Prize is, or who think Hyperthreading is what puts a monogram on the back of their skin tight jeans and wonder what life would be without a Cell Phone sticking out of their head.  At 21 they think they're getting 'old' and 'is there life after 20?' and that maybe waiting the counter at the local Quiznos or Shop-rite is a good way to get a benefits package when the parents won't pay for it any more?  Then, who's calling the shots, Bill? With all due respect, were it the case that President Bush thought this off-shoring labor a good idea: THE PRESIDENT WOULD BE WRONG, too. Unlike the infamous 'brain drain' this is now become the 'brain-wallet oppression-repression' of American technological and scientific talent, the ultimate deficit builder and the ultimate job killer!  There will be NO software jobs left! And you wonder how we'll respond in this industry?  Frankly, I'd be surprised if the thinking workers of this country didn't rise up and beat down your doors with pitchforks and torches and axes like the proverbial Frankenstein story, because that is what you've done here, Bill.  You've created a FRANKEN-SOFTWARE enterprise! Your reply is priceless! You've suggested: 'That money will return!' as an answer to complaints like mine? Perhaps it will, Bill: but the jobs WON'T!! It's not about the money returning or not, Bill, it's about those key jobs and the lives and families of hundreds of thousands of America you've just sentenced to starve or find something other than Computer Science to do. Shame on you, Bill Gates, and that's the very first time in 27 years I've said that!! Shame on you! You can turn in your Spock Ears, they are no longer appropriate. WHAT A SELL-OUT!"

"With nary but supportive tech support and recommendation of solutions, we've put up with software shipped us in an incomplete state with no documentation, $250 for a 50 cent CDROM, a 10 cent COA and a 35 cent mini-manual, we've applied updates that sometimes not only make the job harder but were so badly written they undo all the work we do trying to safeguard customers and then totally disrupt their systems, improvements that bring along with them new, more bizarre weaknesses and new bugs that compound old ones that were 'fixed', and an Operating System that only knows one form of 'pre-emptive multitasking': it does whatever it wants to and PRE-EMPTs THE USER like that old IBM 3274 WAIT Light! Its idea of Demand Paging is to demand page itself into oblivion if we push it too hard!  We've had to put up with software written not to CompSci standards, but to Microsoft standards, software that incorporates a grafted-together combination of features from Apollo Domain of the early 80's, Unix of the 60's and 70's, Vax VMS of the late 80's, Lan Manager and Warp and Windows NT of the 90's, and add-ins from every known source. To cap it all off, modern Browsers and Media Players of the new millennium sit like a head on top of Frankenstein's Monster O/S! Yet, in all due deference, if you would take the time to refine the product not by replacing it, but by evolving it in place with global optimization, dynamic coding refinements, well written bug fixes and seam elimination, it could evolve into a pretty good system, one which once it attained reliability people would want to buy over and over and over again without question. Yet, we never seem to get there before Microsoft is anxious to completely replace it all with yet another Frankenstein's Monster!"

"And this 'Indian R&D' you seem so adamant about investing in, your Indian 'tech support': with rare exceptions they seem to be nothing but an empty bag.  For example: they take a bug report, shove it under the rug, call back without doing a thing in a 'follow up', then send out a 'bug resolved' report by email, and suggest that if we have any more problems we should email your Compass system! They do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL as part of that Billion Seven Software India plan.  They don't even begin to address a problem, with one rare exception.  They simply write down the report, move on, and the process eliminates the reporting party apparently so there be no accountability to the customer.  And, as a result: bugs languish across 5 releases at a time without anyone acknowledging noticing them. We reported a Front Page Bug that has been in existence for 5 releases, and has over a million returns from Yahoo when we put the error message in, yet your 'Indian Tech Support' calls and closes every report and dutifully notches another 'yankie kill' on their report card as if to say: 'look at all the bugs we resolved without you having to do anything, Bill and Steve'!  To them, the effort of routinely ignoring all reports and thereby making it impossible to get anything fixed is as good as a home run!  You've become the GREAT BENEFIT of the Software Industry! (The Rainmaker, 1997) DENY ALL CLAIMS is clearly their guiding principle! It takes us months of trying to get you guys to even BEGIN to see the errors in your code, and then it's usually 'they're working on it!' and nothing happens.  We're even told by Microsoft reps: don't report bugs to tech support India, send them to this email address... which also gets us no reply. Yet, where they tell us NOT to go, is where you just sent a Billion Seven, Bill! It took us over 9 years to get you to look at security weaknesses and then what do you do: you try and replace the whole Security field with "OneCare", like we should RELY on you now for Security, given your track record, Bill?  You and Steve don't even have the courtesy to allow others to prosper, do you? Instead you repress entire market segments and logo them with the flying Microsoft Multi-colored Iron Cross."

"You should be reinvesting that Billion Seven into the American software industry, Mr. Gates!  This is not a game of seeing how many $5000 a year Indian coders can dance on the head of a pin, when you can afford to do otherwise, Bill!  I'll tell you what, here, this is my new Microsoft Job Definition: I'll just stand on your front lawn in a Jockey's outfit and you can tether your horse to me, okay, Bill? Or I'll wear a bridge table on my head and carry a Dr. Pepper six pack, while you play those vaunted games of Bridge, okay?  While your buddy Mike Krell makes more commercials about 'a Chimp Named Jack' who wants to buy a cheap, shoddily manufactured HDTV 'like his next door neighbors' looking out his side window, while customers file Class Action Suits against Krell in California alleging Bait and Switch and Financing Fraud, and customers file Class Actions against Microsoft alleging defective XBOX 360s and you take on South Korea rudely stating you won't deliver Windows without Media Player, okay? And while you're all fighting it out in Court, I'll be sitting around talking to my Microsoft Rep. from my new position as a Microsoft Partner tethering horses on your front lawn or holding up a Bridge table, saying: "Hey, dem Cotten Gins dey be needin' some oil, Massah Randy! Oah, yes sah: we not goin' make ah quota if'n ye don oil er up, Massa Brubakah, and Ginny she needs sum new shoe dis wintah oah she gone die fum de gout! Sos ifn ya wan her tah do duh dishes fo de Missus, den we bettuh oil up dem Gin machine, suh!"

"Just don't give me any more of that bottlespit about 'The investment will result in lower cost in software to consumers and more innovation'--  AT WHAT PRICE, BILL?  When have you lowered your prices? Today, 20% off Server 2003 for the Holidays? Windows XP costs about $205 retail.  DOS only cost $49.95.  Office costs $500, and we can't even publish a larger website site-site using Publish from Front Page without it failing, FrontPage and its Extensions are written so poorly! And jump into Microsoft Development?  That's an 18 month Empower Investment, seeking out an ISV license, and buying tens of thousands of dollars of More software.  And advertising at the cost of today's 1/10th of 1% return rate on Pay Per Click and Opt-In advertising, and that's just to get a lead, not a sale?  Whatever happened to the notion of 'encouraging' software development Bill? All you've done thus far is alienate the entire Industry, capped by THIS move! Enough is enough, Bill: if we have to put up with selling Microsoft software written by OUR competition in India, then it better be 100% Bug Free when you release it, invulnerable to attack, and 1000% up to the standards of OUR and OUR CUSTOMERS requirements in every aspect of Quality, Form, Ease of Use, Fully Documented, Conformant to Standards, and Fully Functional at time of release, meeting ISO Book Standards of Fitness (today, it's not, Bill, it may have come a long way, but it's got an even longer way to go!), or we simply won't buy it OR sell it for you any more.  We've had to debug this software ourselves without any guidance to speak of and come up with working solutions and work-arounds in the field for so long, that we even forgot you weren't paying us for THAT!  What, we make what: $0 on every copy of your software we sell for so long as you give huge breaks to your bigger customers?  We outnumber them, Bill, but clearly, you prefer a flat playing field except LESS FLAT for some, as in Orwell: 'Some partners are more equal than others' ('1984' George Orwell) !!  Sadly, Bill, you've taken a financial wiz all over me and my fellow American Software Community members and the entirety of the PC Industry (between this $1.7 Billion and that crash prone XBOX 360 Gamer's-Power-PC and a Windows X64 that you expect US to debug for you), so much so that frankly: even I'd sooner use LINSPIRE than be sold down the river into the moral equivalent of a Programmer's Concentration Camp any more by the likes of Microsoft!  Can you hear me clearly now, Bill? Shame on you! You and every other IT Manager and Corporate Executive busily off-shoring their labor pools thinking their ESOPs will gain and the strategic consequences will be minimal.  Guess again, Bill, Guess again... before long, they'll be buying up your company's stock, and you'll be giving your Job and your Money away to someone from Bombay! Like I said before, you don't know your History!!  Those who don't are doomed to relive it!"

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Boycotting the Off-Shoring List of Shame
    written by Paul F. Jost, Research Department: Labor Affairs, ACSA

       "What are people going to do if they outsource every job to offshore labor?"
                          -- Joanne Guilder, New York City Public School #12 Student

A very good question.  In our opinion:

Even lawyers are not immune.  And at present trends, most legal pleadings will be written by foreign labor pools by the year 2011. Lawyers will face a 75% unemployment rate, while the top 10% of the Law Firms will control 90% of the legal work, while the remaining practitioners cry into their beer.  This is not just a trend that affects American technology workers...  This is the tail that eats the head of the beast.  Eventually it raps around on all thinking workers in the US, reducing labor demand in each and every field of expertise by 90%.  Exchange Rate/Cost of Living Difference based labor expense reduction is a suicidal effort to capitalize on so-called globalization, a program that hides the transfer of labor to cheaper workers, is being stimulated by the Rockefeller Brothers' Fund and the Rockefeller Institute, two of the most powerful sources in America.  It benefits only the top 10% of any field, leaving the remaining 90% in a state of "window jumping" - leaping to their demise from their office windows when the rent simply can not be paid, when the kids college tuition can not be afforded, when the lease on the Saab or Nissan Maxima can no longer be paid.  As the Rockefeller family dominates 75%-95% of the top 10% of every market, the effort is being spearheaded by their enormous wealth and influence, continuing to seek monopolies while circumventing anti-trust laws.  Such has laid waste to the greatest single field of brain work in American History, the computer industry, over the course of the past 8 years.  And we want our jobs back.

The enormous American worker losses have not just been confined to thinking jobs in customer care, R&D and customer support. The process has resulted from a cost reduction practice called: Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), a loose term created by those in the Global Arena who are promoting it.  Unfortunately, the US Department of Commerce, in efforts begun during the Clinton Administration by nearsighted astigmatic idiots, have been promoting it for lack of other ways to build international relationships.  We call it: death to America in small steps off-shore.  America's ability to produce, its ability to think and engage in research, its technological advantage, is what saved it during World Wars.  Right now, we believe America is being set up. 

The key originator of the concept was David Rockefeller, scion of Standard Oil, who with his brothers Laurence and John conceived of "Globalization", a key interest of their empire. This is the same group who gave us the Office of Human Genetics, with it's mass sterilization campaign and Master Race theories which it fed Nazi Germany during it's rise.  This is the same group whose computer company, IBM, supplied tab computation and system engineering services to Nazi Germany and the SS to organize railroads and death camps during the Holocaust, who supplied Nazi Germany illegally with oil and technology to rise up and conquest Europe, England, Russia and the rest of the world... Vietnam was an exercise in softening up the Gulf of Tonkin for exploitation of it's vast sub-oceanic gas fields for them.  East Timor: the same.  Venezuela: the same.  Nigeria: the same.  These are also the guys who most profited illegally from Kofi Anan's "Food for Oil" program during which the Rockefellers offered to use their influence over Anan and the UN to cause the UN to lift the trade sanctions off of Saddam Hussein and Iraq if Hussein would grant Standard Oil's businesses full rights to Iraq's Oil Reserves, the second largest such reserves on Earth. Oh, and the Rockefellers' back channel operatives in France also offered Saddam limited nuclear weapons capability provided by the AQ Khan network of Pakistan and Parvez Musharraf, with whom they held a special relationship, thereby triggering the necessity for America to invade Iraq to prevent such a deal from ever completing.  These are the same Rockefellers whose nephew, Senator Jay, lectured for the last four years of the Clinton Administration that Iraq was "becoming the greatest singular threat against the USA and had developed relationships capable of providing him nuclear weapons, in fact he was stockpiling them."  He ought to know since his family was in that Nuclear Negotiation with Saddam, offering to and possibly providing those weapons to Hussein (and Khadaffi) through their AQ Khan / Musharraf middlemen.  And this is the same Rockefellers who then attacked the Bush Administration through the electoral process for invading Iraq to blockade the Rockefellers' effort to sell nuclear weapons to Saddam in exchange for the oil, claiming it was all just a figment of the Bush Administration's imagination, using Rockefeller controlled TV nets (CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN) and press organizations (AP, NY Times, Washington Post, etc.) to attack the credibility of the war along with Rockefeller controlled senators Boxer, Biden, Kennedy, Rockefeller, Byrd, Bayh, Kerry, McCain and others in the DNC such as Howard Dean and Jon Edwards, who may not realize the trend they're vetting.  Those same Rockefellers are promoting Globalized Business Process Outsourcing in every single field they have a presence in within the United States. Not just the Computer field, but the Legal, the Manufacturing, every field.  Since the computer industry and communications are used to virtualize outsourced labor so it can render an appearance inside of outsourcing business's processes, it became crucial for them to alter the technology industries first, so as to silence the wagging tongues! (Such as ours...)

Welcome to David Rockefellers' planet, American lawyers and other thinking labor!  You can kiss your collective jobs goodbye!

ACSA believes that in modern American technology companies, American thinking technology workers should be given the right to hold such jobs first... with outsourcing off shore used as a last resort only.  Today, modern Corporate Geneticists are trimming back American labor without concerns nor awareness of what it is doing to their companies, their products and America proper.  Read Press Release >  This is the trend of using "people control technology" philosophized by John S. Rockefeller during the 40's 50's...

The following is a list of American technology related companies, according to industry researchers, who employ off-shoring Cell Centers, Tech Support and Customer Care personnel and Sales and Marketing personnel.  If you believe you are being improperly reported here (note, improperly does not refer to your wanting to keep your off-shoring a secret, it refers to the date of entry, and type of call center personnel, or if you believe you do not have any call centers off short) please contact us with a correction request.  Please note that this list is subject to change.  Call Centers in India, Manila, Romania, Pakistan, China, the Philippines, Canada and South America are quite common.  The list is under construction.  We propose a Boycott of the goods of any company who deploys off-shore call centers to replace "more expensive" American labor. 

There is more to business than just saving money.  Sometimes it's about saving jobs.  Because some of these companies provide essential services, we recommend either picking an alternative, or limiting your consumption of their products by 1/2 or more.  Note that the top 10 Banks, top 10 Credit Card providers and top 10 financial institutions all use call centers like these to reduce labor cost.  The migration began heavily during the Clinton Administration and resulted in a net loss to our industry of 4.6 million jobs by the time President Bush took office.  It continues to grow, unfettered.  We are working with the State Governments and the IRS to require FICA, Social Security and benefits tax to be assessed on employers for every employee they deploy in such centers so as to equalize the effects, as well as state taxes on products sold by companies employing them.

This list is far from complete and far from comprehensive, nor does it span all the industries, just the technology related businesses.  And it is only the beginning. Plans are afoot to propagate this BPO Offshoring to include every expendable worker in every business in all of the USA.  Unless something is done to halt the progression, this country is facing another Great Depression within the next decade or less.  Jobs and Small businesses are the fuel of America, brains and thinking workers are the power.  Deprive America of both, and you've defeated her.   Before long the only jobs remaining for Americans will be Soldier, French Fries Cook, Funeral Home operator or Blood Technician.  God Bless America, and God Help us in a time when a true threat to our country is not yet realized by our citizens nor by our government.  Here's the growing list.

CALL CENTER and TECH SUPPORT OUTSOURCING  2005            Data Source: US Department of Commerce Globalization Report            presented at the January 18th Annual Conference of the International            Call Center Association.  Additional citations below.
Company Name		Call Centers	Tech Support / Eng.  R&D Centers	Sales / Marketing Centers
America On Line		X	X	X
Microsoft Corporation		X	X
IBM		X	X	X
Krell Inc.		X (home users only)	X (home users only)
SBC		X	X
AT&T		X	X
Verizon		X	X
Cingular		X
T-Mobil		X
Verizon Wireless		X
CompuServe		X	X
GE Company		X (Romainia)	X
Sprint		X	X	X
All Tel		X	X
Master Card		X
Visa		X
Hughes Electronics		X	X
Qwest		X	X
Comcast		X (Canada)	X (Canada)
CISCO		X	X
Netgear		X	X
Avaya (Lucent)		X	X
HP-Compaq		X
Nortel		X	X
Oracle		X	X
Sun Microsystems		X	X
Boeing		X
American Express		X	X
Citi			X
Foster Wheeler			X
Coca Cola			X
Pepsi			X
Ford			X
GM		X	X
Daimler Chrysler		X	X
Computer Sciences Corporation			X	X
Atlantic Richfield Corporation			X
BASF (Mount Olive, NJ)			X
Computer Task Group (Buffalo)			X
Spree.com		X	X
Niagara Mohawk Corporation		X	X
VERITAS Software Corporation		X	X
PeopleSoft Inc.		X	X
Macromedia Corp		X	X
SAP America		X	X
Computer Associates International		X	X
Red Hat			X (Russia)
Adobe		X	X
Apple		X	X
Novell		X	X
Seimens (a German company)		X	X
RCA SG Thompson		X	X
Lotus (an IBM Company)		X	X	X
AMD			X
MOTOROLA		X	X
Intel		X	X
Delta Airlines		X	X
EDS		X	X
Admiral		X	X
Datamonitor Corp		X	X
Amazon		X	X
Halliburton		X	X	X
Schlumberger		X	X
Honeywell		X	X	X
FMC Technologies		X	X
Nexans		X	X
(under construction)	There is nothing respectable about what the above companies are doing...

One can see that the trend has not had much impact on sales revenues other than to harm them.  Increasing earnings alone by reduction of labor using off shore call centers, appears to create a stigma or sense of futility about dealing with a vendor that is so great that, even without language barriers, the results have a negative impact on overall sales inside of the United States.  This happens for a variety of reasons.  For example, the sense that a company won't use American personnel, suggests that it is not fiscally committed to first rate tech support.  Secondly, there is a comradeship based on familiarity that off shoring defeats.  And there are many more reasons.  The results, however, are downturns in overall sales from both new and repeat customers, that greatly exceeds the earnings boost, which may take place for three quarters or so until the public finds out, followed by a general reduction in interest for the company's product, followed by rumors and gripes about the offshore centers, followed by a general trend towards even greater reduction in sales.  The long term effects could be an unstoppable decline.  Companies who once use offshore call centers tend not to find out until it is too late, the drop in sales becomes a trend and all efforts to alter the negative image of off shoring, may have a negligible impact.  So the so-called 'blessing' of globalization of customer care and support has both a short range earnings improvement and a long range sales decline.  If management is imperceptible to this, over time they will entirely stratify to the point where sales become flat or decline.  And so, management will try corporate diversification or acquisition to grow, with the same declining effect on purchased or diversified assets.

Ultimately, by the time anyone figures out it doesn't work, which we in the computer industry can tell you from our experiences when the major board producers went offshore, and we had to rebuild our own tech support here for others products, by the time they figure it out, they have two problems: a company on the brink of disaster that has no idea it's due to off shoring, and both a customer base and a labor pool here in the United States that's on the verge of becoming a Cyber-Lynch Mob as has been experienced here by companies with notable failings using off shoring.  Several PC companies in the US have learned the hard way, one of them stopped using off shore call centers for major corporate and government clients, according to the press, and only use it now for their home users.  Even then, we believe the reputation loss and perception by both the customer base, future customers and the labor pool in the computer industry has darkened to such a degree that some American technology firms that engage in offshoring, should by now be seeing impact on their revenue and earnings, both.  All efforts to warn companies in our industry have been responded to solely by legal replies, mainly threats, as companies for some reason believe that they can compel organizations like Consumer Concerns to keep their mouths shut about Off shoring.  The problem is, the first person who gets a Gupta Patel on the phone and recognizes that the company they bought a product or service from does not care to pay top dollar for American labor, right or wrong - the reaction we've logged appears to be a personal distaste for the interaction and a belief that they are being swindled.  Not that they are, but that they believe they are, and one need only go on the Internet and look at the gripes being posted anonymously all over the place, to see how people seem to feel.

That is not to say that any company is wrong about whether the support or customer care is the same from offshore versus on.  It's just, as all reasonable businessmen know, the perception held by the customer takes control.  In the case of offshoring, the impression is not a good one: it seems to cause the customer enough perception of neglect and tarnishes the vendor in their minds' eyes, sufficiently that they feel they most go out and tell everyone about their experience, leading to vast Web postings and letter writing campaigns.  Worse, the fires that are started when a company goes to offshore labor pools, quickly get fanned by the labor pool left behind in America who are without jobs.  The Auto industry saw this problem in the 70's, 80's and 90's when UAW walkouts would occur, sometimes even if only a Japanese automobile parked in a GM Plant, much less when union management talks were on. 

The sensitivity of this issue, which represents loss of livelihood to millions of people suggests a gross insensitivity to the facts by corporate boards seeking stock option Band-Aids and balance sheet bubblegum.  Rather than addressing the long term necessities of keeping one's customers loyal and repetitive customers, the lure of easy profits blinds them to the real economic danger.  And none of the advocates of off shoring have clean hands, either.  Their arguments appear to us to be very strongly biased, so as to capitalize on the need for instant balance sheet gratification that often drives corporate management.

Hey, we all being software programmers, have been facing devastating job losses, and frankly suing us is like suing an empty bag, not only is the law on our side when it comes to speaking out under the 1st Amendment about this trend to offshore being a major disaster, we want every field in America, including the lawyers who search the web looking for any negative statement about their respective client, to realize: YOU, TOO, ARE FACING OFF SHORING and not in the too distant future.  We've polled Judicial Watch, Common Cause, and the American Bar Association, among others, and the majority of lawyers we asked agreed that they did not like the trend and were aware that it might invade the legal industry, as it has the programming and customer support fields. Before very long, the only lawyers working in a field, might be those representing offshore legal labor pools who do the brain work, in Court preceding, reducing the available work for lawyers by 75-90% as it has the programmers.  Worse yet, telephonic groups like 888-Lawyers and Prepaid Law can hire outsource trained offshore legal talent from India or Manila to provide telephone legal support for those with routine problems.  We predict that no industry (other than those who must make a personal appearance) will be left untouched and the importation of offshore talent into the American labor pool, of Indians and Philippine trained, US admitted lawyers could have the same impact as has the importation of Russian, Indian and Philippine programmers on the US computer industry.

Mark our words well, attorneys.  The great evil of it all is, there's probably plenty of work for programmers in Corporate America, today when asked, many IBM Sales Reps say they simply can't find the programmers.  To force Corporate America to buy his "globalization", Mr. Rockefellers' managers have VAPORIZED the placement firms who were responsible for making matches between available programmers and programming jobs, including the total disruption of IBM Professional Services and AT&T Professional Services, GE Information Systems Company, and numerous studies luring companies offshore with the lower cost offshore shops.  The problem being, programming has to be performed close to the tasks at hand, system design must take place on premises with the business processes being emulated or enhanced, and what's left can't be simply shipped by email to a group of fresh out of college people in India.  It doesn't work that way.  The results: only the top 10% of Corporate America are truly getting software systems improvements while the rest become softened up and rife for acquisition as they labor away trying to reuse either older systems, or buy Mr. Rockefellers' shrink-wrap solutions even though his many companies producing them haven't a clue what a CRM or a Word Processor really ought to do.  Former totally custom software development has devolved to offshore and some onshore programming and stop gaps trying to use shrink-wrapped over the counter systems that simply can't do the job.  The effect: those companies below the top of the tip of the pyramid are declining in systems, but don't notice because they keep buying newer and newer PCs and Servers, thinking that all that pretty new hardware will brighten up their bottom line.  Instead, they've been robbed.  Believe you ACSA, unless thinking professionals band together to resist Mr. Rockefeller, we are all, programmers, researchers, lawyers, customer care, life cycle testers, all of us are going to end up trying to get jobs selling at Radio Shop or flipping burgers at Burger Kane.

Again, our experience with everyone from IBM to Intel to Motorola to you name it sending their printed circuit board work to China, has taught us that a) you may be able to build things in offshore sites, but they won't be better quality, just cheaper; b) anything else is a bust, including call centers, tech support and R&D.  Worse, it leads to total loss of control over intellectual property and eventually America's democracy will be replaced by a Plutocracy headed up by some descendent of Jay or David Rockefellers, with everyone else feeling like one of the citizens of Iraq under Saddam Hussein's rule!   In fact, of you look how Rockefeller uses the legal arms of his many businesses to bash competitors who dare oppose him, you have to realize, YOU'RE JUST TRAIN CONDUCTORS AND TRUSTEES IN WHAT IS ULTIMATELY ANOTHER FORM OF HOLOCAUST DEATH CAMP RELOCATION.   Look at what's actually going on, without those deep pocket driven rose colored glasses on, those of you out there who remain skeptical: they're simply giving your and my jobs away to foreign workers and trying to force us to either make do with a minor sales job or a minor sales position, in Retail.  It may not have hit your industry in any great way, yet, Mr. Attorney, but given a choice between $20 an hour labor versus $150-350 an hour labor, which do you think they'll choose?  We're all being turned into slave laborers forced to take less than equitable salary for our work, all of us, one class and labor market segment at a time, much as Nazi Germany tricked Jews into getting passively onto those Railroad Cars for "relocation".  They're doing pretty much the same thing to all of us, while clouding the issue with loads and loads of Press Rhetoric, false economic studies, political manipulation and other forms of BS!  It's wholesale slaughter.

Is that why you spent all the time and money going to college, folks?  Passing the Bar? Interning as a clerk?  Working your way up the partnership ladder? Financing and paying off the financing of your partnership or private practice?

Mark our words well, attorneys.  Mark our words well, President Bush.  Mark our words well, American Worker, this is the elimination of the Middle and Upper Middle Class, we're all being replaced by a less expensive version offshore, irrespective of the consequences.

Mark our words well, corporate board members, you're being tricked and lured by techniques that not only will injure your company, they will cost you your jobs, pensions and even stock options, techniques which which have already cost such as Carly Fiorino, Lou Gerstner, and eventually, most Corporate leadership their jobs: OFFSHORING is DESIGNED TO REPRESS YOU to make room for offshore businesses owned by those very same Rockefellers seeking to enter your markets with altogether cheaper companies from those same offshore locales.  This is the worse situation we have ever diagnosed in the American community - the game is afoot and we're all the canon fodder...  It's LABOR WAR and OFFSHORE INVASION, a new form of World War, WORLD WAR III is upon us and we haven't even recognized that is a new kind of war. It's a war in which terrorism is only one component part, two key other parts being OFFSHORE LABOR OUTSOURCING and the other being importation of OFFSHORE LABOR AND CORPORATIONS all under the serpentine control of America's ruling Plutocrat(s).

Mark our words.

Please submit outsource information >

University Liaison should register here >         Union Organizational Liaison should register here >

A brief further editorial:

The ACSA is quite disheartened by the sanctimonious, self serving nature of the "rationales" and "justifications" given for draining off this most precious resource necessary not only to America's survival but to our National Security.  As software fails to meet our requirements, as more and more hackers and spyware/adware/virus intrusions take there toll, as more government agencies fail to obtain the software solutions they need, as time goes on, America is headed backwards into an era of technological mediocrity, and it's businesses' infrastructures are weakening at a rate unequalled in American History.  Is OffShore Outsourcing thinking technology workers a mistake?  We know it's a HUGE mistake.

It's time for America's thinking technology worker to FIGHT BACK.

It's time for Corporate America to wake up to the greed-backed insanity of its choices.

It's time to have the backbone to wage a BOYCOTT!

More on this later on...

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PARTIAL LIST OF CITATIONS

1. IMOLI http://www.rozina.com/clients.html
2. Call Centers Romania, http://callcentersromania.com/
3. Renodis, http://www.renodis.com/about/market_overview/success_stories.html
4. Computerworld, http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/story/0%2C10801%2C84861%2C00.html
5. Krell home support in Bangalore continues, EBS, http://www.ebstrategy.com/Outsourcing/cases/failures.htm
6. FOR A FULL LIST, PLEASE WRITE TO ACSA.

Authored in conjunction with an appeal to the US Department of Commerce to HALT further "Offshore Outsourcing Programs" which clearly do not represent the wishes of at least 10% of the citizens of the United States, and likely 80% more...