RE: India - wave of the future?

["Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com>]

Geoff Hart wrote

> The "buying time" solution involves making our value known to our
> employers,
> and making sure they know exactly what they're going to sacrifice by
> outsourcing work. Pointing out that laying us off means that there will be
> that many fewer people who can afford to buy a company's products is the
> best solution, but fails the pointy-haired-boss test.

It fails a number of tests. In a healthy economy, the lowest cost supplier
always wins. The net result of this has always been that production
increases and almost everybody gets richer. Yes, there are victims. There
are those who cannot or will not adapt, and they will suffer. But overall,
people keep getting better and better off.

What is abundantly clear is that a company that fails to use the lowest cost
supplier eventually goes out of business because other companies beat their
prices. Yes, figuring the true cost of a supplier is not always easy, and
what looks like a less expensive solution may turn out to have hidden costs.
But you must always seek to reduce your costs or go under. National
economies are subject to the same pressures. You cannot insulate yourself
from the market.

> Hate to be a wet blanket here, but we've got a big problem coming. No
> obvious solutions either.

Certainly there is an obvious solution. Either become a lower cost supplier
or go find something else to do. So it has always been, and so it shall
always be. It is entirely appropriate for societies to extend some charity
to those who have difficulty with the transition, and even sometimes to
regulate the speed of change, but no society can or should attempt to hold
back the tide.

Technical writers, however, if they are as clever as they generally claim to
be, should be able to anticipate the changes to come, to weather the change,
and to prosper.

> The current situation has been called "reverse
> colonialism" or "the revenge of the third world", and it's not hard to see
> why.

The prophets of a bright tomorrow have been trumpeting the elimination of
distance as a great boon to mankind for a long time. And so it is. Distance
is a drag on productivity and destroyer of value. Surely it should have been
clear to everybody, however, that the destruction of distance would mean the
reduction or elimination of location as a factor driving cost. This is a
good thing for the economy, because it reduces costs. But it does mean that
people whose goods or services are location sensitive will face costs
pressures.

This has little to do with colonialism or the third world per se, except
that they are far away and therefore the destruction of distance improves
their competitive position. But we should notice that the destruction of
distance has been going on for centuries, even millennia. The domestication
of the horse, the invention of the boat, the fully rigged ship, the compass,
the chronometer, the railway, the locomotive, the steamship, the airplane,
refrigeration, radio, television, and the internet are all stages in the
destruction of distance. And they have all proved to be of enormous economic
benefit to the vast majority of the world's population.

There are victims of progress. Those who train too narrowly, or who cling
too tightly to particular economic functions and titles, are likely to be
the first among them. But I would have thought that people with the
backgrounds of technical writers would be among the least likely to allow
themselves to become such victims.

---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com

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