Yesterday I got a call from an old friend of mine regarding this blog. I had asked him to read it but I had forgotten to give him the URL so he wanted the URL. When I put the phone down I got nostalic as I consider him one of the original technology GURUS. These are the guys who knew stuff about computers years before this IT boom took place.
I have known several GURUS such as him who were so far ahead of most of us in computer technology, its application and the development platforms. These guys knew the core of technology and did thier work for the sake of advancement of thier knowledge and capability. If you wanted to know about application of technology in the REAL WORLD scenario, how to get it done, which technologies to use , you would turn to them. They KNEW how to give the BEST of technology to the user. They used technology not for the sake of technology but they used technology for the sake of the user and that differentiated them from the rest.
But in this new age of huge IT companies, supposedly huge IT projects , massive projects, 100s of software programmers somehow they dont seem to figure in this BOOM at all. I would have thought that people such as this would be in the fore - front of the huge commercial successes in IT but somehow they dont seem to around. It is just not a few of them but a majority of them.
Did they get left behind, were they not recognized for thier talents, did they not want to join this WAVE.. this is something I have not been able to figure it.
According to me, had these people been recognized by the fathers of business , had they been adopted and groomed to lead the technology push of the country in this era of IT, I do believe we would have genuinely been able to claim that we werent just a cheap worker force in IT, but a TRUE scientific and advanced community in the field of IT.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Saturday, June 10, 2006
The software vegetable market.
Our company is a small company, a micro ISV as they call it and naturally the market segment we market and advertise to and who usually respond are small companies themselves. These small companies cater for the bulk of our business.
However as the days go by I see a very strange trend. It seems man hour rates for programming seem to be the only criteria for winning a BID, not infrastructure, not expertise, not experience , it always seems to boil down only to price. !!! The cheaper you are ..the better chance it is to win the bids.
Now there are so many of us offering the same programming services , with the same level of expertise, our websites look the same, we have the same things to say so I suppose the company wanting to outsource some programming work goes to google, send emails to 10-15 companies like us.. gets the quotes and gives the order to the lowest bidder.
This whole scenario reminds me of a vegetable market in our area. When you enter there is a line of vegetable vendors having baskets of vegetables in front of them. As you walk past them , each one tries to sell thier vegetables to you, shouting the prices and trying to outbid each other. All have the same kind of baskets, the same quality of vegetables so in the end you will naturally buy the cheapest. Sound familiar doesnt it !!
The software companies are the vegetable vendors with their basket of vegetables yelling away prices to a customer. Pity such high skill sets across companies like ours are caught in a situation such as this. We have been blinded by the short term profits of coding services which everyone can do and have not implemented a sustained effort of acquiring and upgrading knowledge in a particular domain.
Soon there will be cheaper vegetable vendors and we will be out of work.
However as the days go by I see a very strange trend. It seems man hour rates for programming seem to be the only criteria for winning a BID, not infrastructure, not expertise, not experience , it always seems to boil down only to price. !!! The cheaper you are ..the better chance it is to win the bids.
Now there are so many of us offering the same programming services , with the same level of expertise, our websites look the same, we have the same things to say so I suppose the company wanting to outsource some programming work goes to google, send emails to 10-15 companies like us.. gets the quotes and gives the order to the lowest bidder.
This whole scenario reminds me of a vegetable market in our area. When you enter there is a line of vegetable vendors having baskets of vegetables in front of them. As you walk past them , each one tries to sell thier vegetables to you, shouting the prices and trying to outbid each other. All have the same kind of baskets, the same quality of vegetables so in the end you will naturally buy the cheapest. Sound familiar doesnt it !!
The software companies are the vegetable vendors with their basket of vegetables yelling away prices to a customer. Pity such high skill sets across companies like ours are caught in a situation such as this. We have been blinded by the short term profits of coding services which everyone can do and have not implemented a sustained effort of acquiring and upgrading knowledge in a particular domain.
Soon there will be cheaper vegetable vendors and we will be out of work.
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