Are American high tech workers obsolete?

[Hewitt Tech]

Interestingly, the short term solutions, cooking the books, laying off most
of the workforce etc.. often have very negative long-term consequences. I
believe there have been recent Wall Street research that concludes that
companies that lay off employees tend to be 'also rans' after a few years. I
always admired the old HP's stance of having their employees volunteer to
take a pay cut with the expectation that the rewards would be there when
things turned around. This probably doesn't matter when a disruptive
technology is in progress but it seems to me that the real assets of most
high tech  companies are there employees. I suspect once a company has
outsourced most of it's employees, there isn't much left in real terms. They
would be very vulnerable to pressure from the very people that they
outsourced to.

-Alex

P.S. Dell is an interesting example of a company with an inovative
financial/business model but otherwise commodity products.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jerry Feldman" <gaf at blu.org>
To: "Greater New Hampshire LUG" <discuss at gnhlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2002 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: Are American high tech workers obsolete?


> I don't think so.
> The Board of Directors are looking at essentially growth in the value of
> their respective investments (not their personal, but the constituency
they
> represent). They hire a management team to do this.
> Take a producer of commodity goods, like PCs. Your margin is shriking. You
> must (1)increase volume, (2) cut costs. At the same time, customers are
not
> very loyal. Why would a customer buy otherwise identical systems from
> Compaq, Dell or Gateway, Much of that is consumer marketing. Right now,
> Dell has a successful marketing edge. In any case, the CEO must cut both
> costs and increase revenue in the short run. If support can be moved
> offshore at a significant cost savings without any reduction of service,
it
> will happen. The same for software development.
> Another cost that gets reduced is R&D. Cutting R&D normally helps short-
> term profits and hurts the long term viability of a high tech company.
> On 13 Aug 2002 at 13:31, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> >   And herein lies the stupidity, arrogance, and ignorance of most US
> > businesspeople.  This is an INCREDIBLY short sighted point of view.  I'm
> > with the CEO of Chick-Fil-A: People and Principles before profits.  The
> > profits will come when you have a satisfied workforce that will gladly
> > devote themselves to your company.  Many other factors must be in place,
> > of course, but this is paramount.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Associate Director
> Boston Linux and Unix user group
> http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
> PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
>
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