When the big outsourcing to India craze began in earnest, I would often rant about how U.S. corporations didn’t seem to realize that they were essentially giving away the family jewels and growing their next great competitors. Now it looks like the chickens are beginning to come home to roost as described in India 2.0: The new garage culture on Mercury News. From the article,
“We are not scared of multinationals. Let them be scared of us,” said Rajjat Barjatya, chief executive of Rajshri Media, a start-up spinoff of the venerable Bollywood entertainment company, Rajshri, that is creating content exclusively for mobile phones. That’s the attitude.
There are a lot of smart and ambitious people in India who are not going to be content to work in call centers for U.S. corporations for very long. And this is good, I like competition. What I don’t like is the short sightedness that I think has led to the gutting of future IT potential in the United States. Young people are staying away from tech careers in droves because they see those jobs going overseas. And don’t let anyone get away with the lie that the jobs left because of a poorly educated populace. Those jobs left because someone somewhere else would work for a lot less money. And now that formerly cheap labor is getting into position to eat our collective lunches.