Plans for an Indian tech support center have been scrapped. A cautionary tale

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has long had a thing for India. After work- ing at game developer Atari (ATAR ) in the mid-'70s, Jobs took a break and backpacked around the subcontinent in search of spiritual enlightenment. Upon his return to the U.S., his more capitalistic instincts took over, and he and Steve Wozniak launched Apple. Today, of course, the seeker-turned- billionaire enjoys a reputation as one of the most successful entrepreneurs and savviest marketing minds on the planet.

I can hire Java guys Bangalore with 3-5 years of experience for $3K a month, and that includes facilities, a PC, network, etc. He may not be brilliant, but he is cheap. Cost of employment there is $36,000 a year. Cost of employment on his American equivalent would be well over $100,000 a year. Most every article I see on outsourcing skews these numbers horribly. Its as though they've never gotten an actual quote in researching their articles. You can hire graduates for $700 a month, if you've got an office. The problem with direct hiring is retaining people. A guy will leave you for $800 a month with zero notice.

Apple's problems would be a little different as they were creating a call center. In my opinion, outsourcing call centers is a TERRIBLE idea. Culture matters in customer service, and giving a guy named Ganesh the name George and forbidding him from giving out his real name is hardly the equivalent of actual cross-cultural education.

Call centers in India are for companies that don't give a shit about customer service. Development centers are not neccessarily this way. The fact that the Apple Service tech I talk to is intimately familiar with technology because he's been a computer dork since age 5 and that he is acclimated to the Western hemisphere matters in whether I recieve satisfactory customer service. Not that customer service for an IT company is a dream job, but in the states people have options and so this job attracts a certain type of person.

A person that is well suited to the job. In India, where opportunity is limited and jobs affording entry to the middle class are not very diverse, this is not the case. If you're from the right city, and you can't become a doctor or a software engineer by getting a CS degree or any engineering degree and then becoming an indentured servant in exchange for training, you try to work at a call center. This being the case, odds are you are not suited to this work, and cultural barriers aside, will suck at it.

It is ironic that 'high value' activities like software development can be successfully outsourced, but 'low value' activities like customer service cannot.

In engineering, your American domain experts can act as quality assurance personnel, ensuring that code from Indian engineers who may not have a perfect grasp of the problem you're trying t... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

India: Why Apple Walked Away

8 lessons on how to repair your personal credit.

TRANSCRIPTS: PsychDoc's Credit Repair School - CreditBoards

So August 6 at the Oklahoma Indian Gaming Association's convention in Oklahoma City, my company Lucision, is releasing version 1.0 of our eMpower Lite global reporting system for casinos. It ties reports from different vendors into a single database for easy viewing through our web reporting system.

Our new web page is up at www.lucision.com but I still have to fix a few things.

Anyway, we are going to be doing branded give-aways. Here's some things we are considering off of www.branders.com:

http://lucision.com/legal/rjurney/Brain.jpeg
http://lucision.com/legal/rjurney/Screw_Driver.jpeg
http://lucision.com/legal/rjurney/Screw_Driver_2.jpeg

The screw drivers are really useful, and are the only give-away I ever end up keeping and using. The brains are... well I'm leaning towards the brains. I want to put them in a big blue barrell labeled 'brain trust' and then hand them out. They're a bit more expensive than the screw drivers, but would generate more buzz.

Thoughts?

In this thread on creditboards.com there is a list of businesses that will give young businesses net-30 that report to D&B. Once you have 5 people that report to D&B/Experian saying you paid your bill, you are able to get some corporate credit cards, and its all uphill from there.

I have recently learned that business to business checks take forever to clear, so this stuff really matters as a buffer against that.

Instructions for establishing business credit once you get a DUNS, bank account, etc.

Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts)
Hello everyone,

I am a Project Manager for construction projects, and I have just been hired to help with the planning and oversight of a $100 million construction project. My primary task at the moment is to make sense of the schedule, milestones, critical path, and, in general, make a very complicated project more comprehensible.

Yesterday I received the current schedule, which was done in MS Project (Gantt view), and is now 770 lines (18 pages). Gantt charts have a lot of good qualities, but at this size they are very hard to read.

After thinking about it for a minute, I realized I have never seen a construction schedule that I would consider an "excellent visual diagram."

Does anyone have any ideas for me?

Hella good discussion by (the Man) Edward Tufte and a dozen or so really good experts on GANTT and PERT charts and managing large projects.

Ask E.T.: Project Management Graphics (or Gantt Charts)

The first thing to understand about Duns and Bradstreet (D&B, DnB), is that you do not HAVE to buy anything to receive a Paydex. D&B will tell you otherwise but it is not true.

The first thing to do is get a D&B number and this can be done through three ways:
First you can go online and get a number for free. It will take 30 days to get the number. It has been some people�s experience that they do not get a number after 30 days and when contacting D&B they say �all you are applying for is a marketing number and you have to buy creditbuilder.� This is not true.
Second, you can call 866-705-5711 and state you are applying for federal grants/contracts and you need a duns number. They will give it to you on the spot with no solicitations.
Finally you can purchase creditbuilder which will include a duns number and you also will get the number right away. Also if you speak to a rep on the phone they sometimes give you the option of buying creditbuilder lite. This can be different prices as it is not listed on the website but others have paid $199 or $250 for it.

This board has a howto on establishing corporate credit.

Duns and Bradstreet-Your Credit File - CreditBoards

Good afternoon. My name is Si Chen, and thank you for coming to my presentation about the adoption of open source business applications.
It's a long of fun to be here alongside the developers and industry veterans who are shaping open source software today because, well, my background is a little different. I used to be a hedge fund manager and worked right up the street at the Met Life building on top of Grand Central, right here in New York City.

I'm here today because about six years ago, I helped start an online retail company named Gracious Style. Being a startup with very little money, we naturally went the open source route. As we grew, I wanted to help build an open source enterprise application suite that could suit the needs of our company and others like it. I did this because I fell in love with the whole idea of open source software, not just because of the cost, but because of the freedom it gave me, the user, to control my technology destiny. In that process, I met a lot of other people, from small business owners to decision makers at Fortune 500 corporations, who were all looking for the same thing—open source applications that could run their businesses.

This is our story of why we're all adopting open source business applications.

Interesting story for friends who find themselves not completely in control of their corporate IT destiny.

Why Enterprises Are Adopting Open Source Applications : Open Source Strategies

If you ever need a business form, or need examples to make your own, this is it.

SBA Online Library - Forms Room

Free way to lookup Texas businesses, whereas the Secretary of State's website wants you to pay for any web search.

Taxpayer and Vendor Account Information

Lookup California business entities and stuff.

California Secretary of State - California Business Search