Off-Shore Engineering

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 22:25, George Toft wrote:
> Jim wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 2003-03-12 at 17:04, David Mandala wrote:
> > > I can't and won't compete with $7 per hour which is what some overseas
> > > programmers are getting (and they are happy with it). I don't think
> > > their rates are going to come up much in the near future so I don't
> > > think it is going to level out.
> > >
> > > That said there are lots of small business that can't go of shore, I
> > > plan on working with them when possible.
> > >
> > 
> > An old, but still valid, axiom in the business world states that if you
> > can't compete on price, compete on quality.
> 
> Beta video format
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VHS - first to have 2 hour format for Hollywood releases
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Amiga Computer,
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argumentative - Macintosh? Alternatives needed DOS to compete at the
time
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Digital Audio Tape
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what did it lose out to? CD's? Hardware too expensive, the price/value
paradigm was tipped too far
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OS/2
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argumentative again
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SPARC and
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When you could buy 2 1/2 PC's for price of Sparc's, price paradigm was
tipped to far
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> MiniDisc
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too damn late into the market
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 are 6 superior products that lost out to price (and/or bad
> marketing). I dunno about that axiom . . .
> 
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There's always exceptions to any rule but yeah...as someone who has
invested in 8 tracks, Betamax, the original Apple IIGS, Macintosh, etc.
I feel the pain. I'm now looking at the cheap plasma tv's, and the
projection tv's and the really cool LCD projection tv's and I already
know that I will make the wrong decision. Sometimes, it seems you just
can't win.

I believe that Richard Milhaus Nixon was quoted as saying, "I would
rather be right than president." He was right.

Then in 1968, he became president - I was convinced that he was wrong. 

;-)

Seems to me that the whole trick of this beast called business is
anticipating the trends so you can leverage your skill set to your
advantage. The programming market has trended off shore for many years
now so I am surprised to read the lamenting going on. 

My 2 big rules of being self-employed success...

1 - never let any customer dominate me, no more than 20% of my income.
If necessary, I can lose any customer at any time and not get hurt.

2 - anticipate the factors that can harm my business and do something
about them long before I am forced to.

Craig