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Massive Chasm In Asia's Public Sector IT Spending 103

Posted by samzenpus from the more-for-less dept.
IT_Sleep_Bag writes "A recent study by Springboard Research shows a massive chasm between countries in the APAC region, with countries like New Zealand and Australia investing up to USD 200 per capita on IT, while India and China spend a dismal USD 1. SDA Asia speaks to Dane Anderson of Springboard Research to explore the reasons for the wide gulf and why he believes India and China will grow the fastest in this regard."
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Massive Chasm In Asia's Public Sector IT Spending More

Massive Chasm In Asia's Public Sector IT Spending

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  • Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by toby ( 759 ) * on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:02PM (#15967281) Homepage Journal
    "What is the reason behind this chasm?"

    (!!??) Look at the math: India has 1.2 billion, many of which are at subsistence level; Australia, a "developed" country, has 20 million fattening middle class aspirants. A 200:1 ratio reflects that reality.

    And of the $200 spent per head in lazy republics, 90% of it goes down the drain (FBI's Keystone Cops IT fiasco [computerworld.com]; name-your-favourite-boondoggle; even Russia caught quickly on to the overspend-and-underdeliver [kommersant.com] game, it's a great way to embezzle). Raising indigent populations to Western standards of waste is not really helpful, is it.

    Anyway, if you didn't get Carr's memo [nicholasgcarr.com]: IT's a commodity now. The industry's shrinkage can't be blamed on nine-whatever or the "War on Common Sense"; the gold rush days are OVER. Spend less and spend better (hint: not on *cough* MS junk; hint: don't reinvent - unless it's to take business from MS :)

    • I can't help but wonder when Indian Engineers are going to ask for rise?
      • I remember reading, probably even on /., that they're doing just that, and getting indignant when /their/ jobs are being outsourced to China/other subcontinent/SE Asian countries with lower wage expectations.
      • What the hell does APAC stand for? Never heard of it...and I looked at the article, and didn't see a definition for what I'm guessing is an acronym?

        Thanks in advance...

        • Likely Asia Pacific, shortened in speach usually as 'Asia-Pac'.
          • Likely Asia Pacific, shortened in speach usually as 'Asia-Pac'.

            I hereby nominate the term 'As-Pac'. Please make sure that you give the 's' the same 'zh' pronunciation that you would if you were pronouncing the word 'Asia'.

    • Re:Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by HMC CS Major ( 540987 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @12:02AM (#15967469) Homepage
      Not MS, and don't reinvent unless it's to take business from MS? Is this an anti-MS rant or real IT advice?

      Spending less and transferring entire enterprises to new platforms are mutually exclusive. Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs, so the desktops will remain Windows for the foreseeable future. You keep AD, but you can roll in Exchange and SQL Server alternatives, perhaps Office alternatives for specific departments where interacting with the outside world isn't necessarily a requirement.

      Remember: it's a company, not a religion. Being anti-MS may be popular on slashdot, but it's not always the smartest (or cheapest) in real business.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs

        The great majority of office workers know how to click three or four icons to start applications, and that's the limit of their knowledge of the OS. Give them an email and wordprocessing app that looks the same (and God knows Open Office is trying hard to clone the interface) and you're done. The small proportion that actually need to use a specific app can st

      • Re:Duh? (Score:5, Funny)

        by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @03:59AM (#15968148) Journal
        Since when does Linux require any training? It's not any different from Windows. You must be used to dealing with megacorps where unionized people refuse to do anything outside their job specification and there's lots of money to spend on frivolous "training" courses, which are usually just an excuse not to be at the office and work.
        Training? What training? How about "If you're too dumb to work with what we give you then RTFM on your own time or we'll find someone with a bit more initiative"?
        My non-technical girlfriend installed Mandrake Linux on her own as far back as 2001, simply because she liked the cool wallpapers, screensavers and minigames she saw on my computer...

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by damaki ( 997243 ) *
          About the small games stuff and linux for a girl, this is not as stupid as it seems. A friend of mine was playing with some of the small games included with Gnome when his sister came. In the end, she wanted to played these games on her own and my friend installed linux it so that she could play.
      • And how does this supposed training differ from the training that Windows Vista and Office Vista will demand? What you are saying in essense is that nobody should upgrade/migrate at all.

        I have myself been involved in migrating 400 users from Windows to Linux. Not a single peep or complaint. Linux in the enterprise can easily be taliored to look almost exactly like the previous enviroment.
      • Spending less and transferring entire enterprises to new platforms are mutually exclusive. Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs, so the desktops will remain Windows for the foreseeable future. You keep AD, but you can roll in Exchange and SQL Server alternatives, perhaps Office alternatives for specific departments where interacting with the outside world isn't necessarily a requirement.

        Remember:
        • Actually, the bigger problem at a lot of sites are splits between corporate divisions or departments on different platforms (or even within IT groups). Novell vs. Microsoft, Unix (Solaris, AIX, whatever) vs. Linux, Windows vs. Linux, whatever. It's dumb, and it wastes time and money. You use the right tool for the job. Your app will work with MS SQL, and you don't need Oracle? Fine, you just saved yourself a panel truck worth of money. Something else is easier to do on Linux? Great, use that.
      • Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs, so the desktops will remain Windows for the foreseeable future.

        Most applications I see nowadays in my office are Web based. Some people may need to use very complicated documents. They can keep their Windows machines if that is the right tool for the job, but all the other people that write a report once in a while can do perfectly with ay application availa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 )

        Face it: retraining 10,000 employees on alternative operating systems won't be nearly as cost effective as maintaining the existing Windows installs, so the desktops will remain Windows for the foreseeable future.

        This is really the pivotal issue. And, incomplete and irrational decisions have been made both ways.

        Your quick evaluation includes correctly includes the cost of retraining office workers on a new system.

        But you have to include the counterweight:
        What is the net present value of all of the futu

      • fair cop (Score:2)

        by toby ( 759 ) *

        Being anti-MS may be popular on slashdot, but it's not always the smartest (or cheapest) in real business.

        I'm bone-tired of fanatical pragmatists throwing themselves in front of the ox-cart of Revolution. Call me back when MS is down to a reasonable 40% market share.

        But I cannot deny those parting remarks were partly playing to the crowd.

      • Just imagine the psychiatric consulting costs that companies will have to bear when the workers don't get their daily dosage of BSOD !!!! On a more serious note though I think a distro like ubuntu desktop is ideal for a secretary or other office worker whose main tasks involve e-mailing, word processing and web browsing.
    • ---Australia, a "developed" country, has 20 million fattening middle class aspirants.
      And of the $200 spent per head in lazy republics---

      No one in developing countries ever uses scare quotes around developing countries and developed countries. The difference between a developing country and a developed country is real damn obvious to everyone here (China), and everyone is working their ass off to become a developed country.

      You have to be a pretty big wanker to think it's an insult to call a country bot

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by toby ( 759 ) *

        I'm sorry you didn't appreciate the ironic quotes around "developed". Perhaps your definition of progress is uncontrolled industrialisation, environmental destruction and social injustice such as the West has enjoyed on an unprecedented scale since the Industrial Revolution. The quotes are intended to question these criteria of civilised Progress.

        You have to be a pretty big wanker to think it's an insult to call a country both fat and lazy. That's a fucking achievement. Many countries -- wait a second, I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LuYu ( 519260 )

      That is not even mentioning the difference in the cost of books due to monopoly rents in Western countries. I was shocked, when I first bought text books in Asia, at how little they cost. The more copyrights are enforced, the more students are ripped off.

      Now, the universities are starting to sell English text books, and the cost of education is going up dramatically.

      A good example of this is Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China series. This book is like an encyclopedia of Chinese s

      • While books in China have always contained Chinese characters, and Asian publishers have no problem incorporating Roman characters into their books, the opposite is true of Western publishers. This is why most works dealing with China in Western languages lack Chinese characters.

        No, the reason for this difference is that University students in China are quite likely to know some English, and University students in American are practically guaranteed to know zero Chinese (unless they are first or second ge

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by LuYu ( 519260 )

          Nice try. However, the books we are talking about are generally targeted at specialists, not at the general student body. If this were a discussion about history books in general, your reasoning would suffice. The truth is, most Western language texts about China that happen to contain Chinese characters have hand written characters (copied as images by the publisher). This points to the obvious conclusion that the only person with the expertise to produce the characters was the author. This also demo

    • I know some people at Australian Government funded research centres like NICTA and CSIRO. They are actually doing a lot of great stuff in both of those places. CSIRO chaired and largely drove the committee that devised the SVG standard, the first open vector graphics and multimedia standard which is really taking off in open source projects like Gnome, Wikimedia, Firefox, Inkscape. At the moment CSIRO is working on another multimedia format for interactive movies or something, I'm not sure of the specifics

    • It gets better (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 )
      Also think of the manpower you can buy with that money. Because a lot of that money goes not just into hardware, but also admins, training, support staff, programmers, etc.

      In China an average salary is IIRC around 1000$ per year. In Australia, a quick googling says that in 2000-2001 it was $34,745. It's probably risen quite a bit more since then, but let's say a very conservative estimate of $35,000 a year.

      I don't know how much more than the average computer-related jobs in both countries are paid, but let'

  • Ok, per capital is fine, but gimme actual numbers (Score:5, Informative)

    by davevt5 ( 30696 ) * on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:03PM (#15967284) Homepage Journal

    So basically that means that China is spending over one billion USD -- $1,306,313,812 according to Google. Whereas Australia is spending $4,018,087,400 (assuming 20,090,437 people again, according to Google). And this means that New Zealand, with 4,035,461 people is spending $807,092,800. Lastly, India with 1,080,264,388 people (thanks Jeeves... um, I mean ASK.com) is spending just over one billion as well.

    To summarize:
    China: $1,306,313,812
    India: $1,080,264,388
    Australia: $4,018,087,400
    New Zealand: $807,092,800

    The actual numbers are more helpful.

    Sure, it looks like Australia is outspending China nearly 4:1. My guess is that looking at per capita is irrelevant.

    • My guess is that looking at per capita is irrelevant.

      Oh, but it's quite relevant to who is going to make the largest percentage of growth:

      To double it's expenditures Australia will have to up the ante to $400 per capita; China $2.

      Predicting China and India to have the largest growth is a bit of no-brainer, slight of spreadsheet.

      KFG
    • These numbers help put things into better perspective. Sure Australia has more money to spend, but this is far bigger than an IT issue. Soem countries provide more general services to their residents and they will naturally spend more on public IT.

      From TFA:

      New Zealand clearly stands out as one of the most progressive countries in the Asia Pacific region, especially when juxtaposed with India. That said, there are two main reasons why a chasm exists between the two in terms of per capita IT spending. Firs

    • Even the numbers don't necessarily tell you much. For example, if one country is spending it's money on MSFT licenses and over-paid admin while another is running it's IT infrastructure on open source enterprise software with averagely paid admin .. that could explain a disparity in cost and potentially allow the cheaper country to come out of it with a better system.

      IT spending should be about getting as much as possible for your money, it's not simply about spending as much as possible.
    • Sure, it looks like Australia is outspending China nearly 4:1. My guess is that looking at per capita is irrelevant.
      My guess is that in .au/.nz well over half of that $200 is spent on software. This closes the gap even more since very little software is purchased throughout Indo-china.
    • The $1 per capita is the amount of money being spent on a small percentage of "Elite" people who actually benefit from this spending. If the percentage is as small as say 10% ( made up percentage for example ) then that would mean they are spending $10 for each of the "Elite" class. Large population numbers dilute these measurements to a meaningless point.

  • Explore the reasons for the wide gulf (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Richer countries have more to spend?

    Where do I pick up my Nobel?

    • Re:Explore the reasons for the wide gulf (Score:5, Interesting)

      by queenb**ch ( 446380 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:12PM (#15967317) Homepage Journal
      How about industrial espionage? Ask Cisco, Nortel and Juniper how much Huawei gear violates their patents...

      Why spend when you can steal?

      2 cents,

      QueenB

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kabocox ( 199019 )
        How about industrial espionage? Ask Cisco, Nortel and Juniper how much Huawei gear violates their patents...
        Why spend when you can steal?

        I love it when foreign patents don't apply to domestic products. The US and Europe really should adopt this IP process. It would foster innovation rather than slow or prevent it as the current US system does. We could apply the same tactics and just copy anything coming from an foreign country rather than paying out royalities/licensing to them. Multinational companies don
    • and simply do more with less. The difference between writing documents on WordPerfect and on MS Office 2007 Vista EyeCandy edition(TM). More productive, spend less time f*cking about with fonts and layout and more time actually writing stuff but on 286 hardware which they got for free.

      Actually, does anyone know of a word processor which doesn't use WYSIWYG mode by default?

       
  • The countries that spend the least in IT and have the most to gain will see the greatest increase in IT spending in the near future.

  • Massive chasm? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zouden ( 232738 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:14PM (#15967326)
    What the hecks? Australia and NZ are completely western and the only way we can be considered part of Asia is by some vague geographical classification. We certainly associate ourselves much more closely with the US and UK than any country in Asia.

    This is like saying "massive chasm in public sector IT spending between the US and Mexico!!" - well... yeah, what do you expect?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nikhilwiz ( 176218 )
      The term Asia is a 'geographical classification'. The other end of the spectrum, which is prevalent all over the US and possibly elsewhere, is thinking the term 'Asian' just refers to peoeple from the far eastern countries and not India, Pakistan, etc. Your perception of geography is skewed when you call such classifications vague.

      • Only in the US. In UK, "Asians [bbc.co.uk]" are South Asians, not (South)East Asians.

        That, however, still isn't as amusing as this old 1960's edition of a Reader's Digest atlas that I have back home. That lists East Asia as the "Far East", West Asia as "Near East" and South Asia as, you guessed it, "Middle East" (which, of course, makes perfect topographical sense if you were seeing the world through a Euro-centric point of view). Seems that these terms have changed complexion only in the past twenty-five years.

        Me? I

    • Re:Massive chasm? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CrankyOldBastard ( 945508 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @12:01AM (#15967466)
      And who is this "We" you are talking about? I'm Australian and I certainly associate much more closely with people from South East Asia and the Pacific Island Nations than I do with the US. The few people I do associate with from the North American continent try to disassociate themselves from the US as well.

      Open your eyes, we are an Asian nation. Our largest growth markets are China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia. The biggest buyer of our steel (our biggest export in dollar terms) is Japan.

      My kids are taught Asian languages at school, not Spanish. They spell "colour", measure in metric, and share time zones with the Phillipines, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.

      Culturaly, Geographically and Economically we are part of Asia. This is not the White Australia age anymore, and Pauline Hanson is not Prime Minister.

      • Re:Massive chasm? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24, 2006 @01:50AM (#15967802)
        And who is this "We" you are talking about?

        The 95% of people of Australasia, including the native peoples, who are not Asian.

        I'm Australian and I certainly associate much more closely with people from South East Asia and the Pacific Island Nations than I do with the US.

        There would be a similar percentage of people in Australia who associate much more closely with people from Africa, but that doesn't make Australia an African country either. The south Pacific islanders are highly distinct from the S.E. Asians and don't consider themselves to be a part of Asia in any way either.

        The few people I do associate with from the North American continent try to disassociate themselves from the US as well.

        Which is probably why they're in Australia, and the other 290 million Americans are in North America.

        Open your eyes, we are an Asian nation.

        Australia is:
        Culturally Asian? - No
        Continentially Asian? - No
        Linguistically Asian? - No
        Racially Asian? - No
        In an identity chasm because of previous political issues? Yes

        Our largest growth markets are China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia. The biggest buyer of our steel (our biggest export in dollar terms) is Japan.

        By that, China is a European country.

        My kids are taught Asian languages at school, not Spanish.

        By this, learning European languages like English places the world in Europe. And almost nobody is taught Spanish as a second language at school outside of the US.

        They spell "colour", measure in metric,

        As does almost everyone outside America.

        and share time zones with the Phillipines, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam.

        Europe and Africa share time zones too, and are as similar distance away from each other.

        Culturaly, Geographically and Economically we are part of Asia. This is not the White Australia age anymore, and Pauline Hanson is not Prime Minister.


        I say call a spade a spade.

        • Re:Massive chasm? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by CrankyOldBastard ( 945508 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @03:03AM (#15968012)
          I'd like to point out that my post was in reply to the claim that we here in Oz are more closely associated with the US and UK than Asia. It is the opinion of many (probably close to 40%) that the clinging to the USA as currently demonstrated by Bonsai Howard (Bonsai - a little Bush) and the UK as demonstrated by Menzies in the 50's are no longer appropriate or helpful to Australia's future growth and security.

          Your post does a great job of attacking my points in isolation, but in no way addresses the thesis that "we" do not unanimously "associate ourselves" with the US and UK, and many of us (particularly those of us from the left side of politics) believe we are an Asian nation.

          You do raise a good point with In an identity chasm because of previous political issues? Yes, although I would contend that the "identity vaccuum" is more due to the promotion of predjudice and bigotry by the extreme right in the last 15 years in this country.
          • "Your post does a great job of attacking my points in isolation"
            You are right there, it does a very good job indeed.

          • I visited Australia in 1997, and I know a lot of people from other parts of Asia. Australia is nothing like any of the parts of Asia I've had described to me. It was like going to Canada.

            So, culturally speaking, Australia is not Asian. It's western. Perhaps not like the US exactly, but it certainly bears much more of a resemblance to Europe as a whole than any part of Asia.

            I do know that Australia was seeing a lot of Asian immigration, and there's a lot of commerce with Asia that goes on in Australia.

        • Re:Massive chasm? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by identity0 ( 77976 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @03:38AM (#15968093) Journal
          But that still doesn't change the wrongness of the original post, which was an assertion that "Australia and NZ are completely western and the only way we can be considered part of Asia is by some vague geographical classification."

          The attempt to make Australia and NZ out to be "not Asian" based on cultural measures and ignore geography is odd, at the very least. He implies that one can be geographically be part of Asia but not Asian based on culture alone.

          It's like Americans claiming they're not Americans because they're western, not native American. There seems to be an Au/Nz tendency to pretend they are a European country. Perhaps because they didn't have a war with the British? But then, Canada didn't, either, and they don't seem so self-concously "not North American" (though they like to point out they are not the U.S.).

          Maybe Au/Nz are just afraid of Asia?

          If you don't consider Pacific islanders or native Australians Asian, I'd like to hear what your definition of Asian is. Do you include Israel? India? Russia?

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by TerranFury ( 726743 )

            >If you don't consider Pacific islanders or native Australians Asian, I'd like to hear what your definition of Asian is. Do you include Israel? India? Russia?

            People use words for geography as codewords for race. By "Asian" he probably means "Han." And because of the way geography has shaped the flow and spread of culture, racial "Han-ness" is a pretty good indicator for other cultural characteristics as well. Australians tend to be white instead of Han, and they tend to use diatonic instead of pen

    • One ironic fact is that China is the leading exporter in IT products [iht.com] (OECD figures). Their biggest customers? Japan and the U.S., naturally.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:31PM (#15967374)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Doesn't talk about purchasing power (Score:4, Insightful)

    by starkravingmad ( 882833 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:34PM (#15967377)
    The article doesn't mention whether costs are calculated at Purchasing Power Parity or not.. $1 in India goes a lot further (e.g., labour costs) than in Australia or New Zealand. I think (look up the CIA world factbook to verify) that Real US $1 = about $6 at PPP in India. Also IT systems have very low marginal costs to usage - e.g., it costs a little more to serve 1 billion people than to serve 20 million - the relationship is not linear. Here's an example of what your IT dollars will bring you in Australia - my company accepts customer applications online - what actually happens is that your form gets emailed to a person on the fifth floor whose job it is to fill an aplication form using the details in the email and then put it through the normal fulfillment process. We spent tens of thousands of dollars on that 'system'.

    • Re:Doesn't talk about purchasing power (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Riding Spinners ( 994836 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:58PM (#15967454)

      It's nice to see someone with at least one semester's worth of economics classes on Slashdot.

      Now, let's not kid ourselves here: the poor developers in India are being exploited. The average salary is around $390/mo.; a kid working part-time down at the local McDonald's in the U.S. make far more money than that. Sure, the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books and computers (and commodities such as drinking water, electricity, and gasoline) still cost the same or more than they do here.

      Convering salaries directly my multiplying or dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity [wikipedia.org] is just plain ridiculous. To sum it up for the economically-inept Slashdot crowd:

      The PPP measures how much a currency can buy in terms of an international measure (usually in U.S. dollars), since goods and services have different prices in some countries than in others).

      Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India and China than they do in the United States. For example: a loaf of bread costs about INR 20 (about $0.43). A monthly lease in a nice, spacious house would be about INR 15000 (about $323). That might seem cheap, but consider this: your average non-American software engineer working in India or China would end up spending about 50% on his or her salary on food alone (Americans, on the other hand, barely spend 8% [wikipedia.org] -- and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering).

      If the exchange rates were to suddenly fluctuate (as they have before), employing people in India and China could become economically unviable. However, that would simply translate to more lower-knowledge work ("shit jobs") in the U.S. -- something that no self-respecting American college graduate would go near. Not much damage to our economy there.

      • "and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering"

        That might be part of it, but its also due to the fact the U.S. massively subsidizes agriculture, especially corn and soy, which has always kept food prices in the U.S. down on the surface though we pay for it indirectly through our taxes. The unfortunate down side of subsidizing corn is its led to the massive use of high fructose corn syrup in our food, because its cheap and mass produced. There is a strong suspicion this is causing the current epide
      • "Americans, on the other hand, barely spend 8% -- and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering"
        Man I never guessed Americans were being genetically engineered to eat less. That would really help their obesity problem though..
  • I couldnt see the link to the actual report, just this interview. Does anyone have the actual report? Otherwise we are just guessing.

  • Growth prediction based on not-so-deep insight (Score:3, Insightful)

    by count0 ( 28810 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2006 @11:45PM (#15967416)
    "why he believes India and China will grow the fastest in this regard."

    Ummm... It's not that hard to see why people at the start of an adoption curve (china) will have faster growth than people who've plateaued (Australia). Given that if you spend $1 more per capita, in China that's 100% growth, and in Australia 0.5% growth...
  • In India there's a big chasm when it comes to public sector spending in general. So IT really isn't high priority - regardless of what the perception maybe. Most of the IT spending in India is private, because the government lags far behind when it comes to creating an environment of progress.

  • different value (Score:4, Informative)

    by john_uy ( 187459 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @12:19AM (#15967519)
    from the springboard research website, the actual tally is:

    Country Per Capital Public Sector IT Spending
      New Zealand $198.78
      Australia $193.82
      Singapore $152.89
      Hong Kong $67.22
      Korea $52.96
      Taiwan $45.22
      Malaysia $21.92
      Thailand $7.41
      China $3.67
      Philippines $2.94
      India $1.29
      Indonesia $1.10

    china spends $3.67 and not $1. there is a big difference given their huge population.

    all in all

    Country Total Spending
    China 4,794,171,690.04
    Australia 3,893,928,499.34
    Korea 2,515,600,000.00
    India 1,413,004,073.55
    Taiwan 1,035,284,044.48
    New Zealand 802,168,937.58
    Singapore 676,648,330.80
    Malaysia 534,538,007.36
    Thailand 478,920,118.95
    Hong Kong 463,729,672.92
    Indonesia 269,998,012.90
    Philippines 258,300,970.62

    * population figures from google and cia.

    from springboard research: "A key focus of this report was to dive deeper into the Public Sector in each country to measure the Sub-Vertical Industries within the Public Sector such as Defence, Healthcare, Social Services, Taxation/Finance, etc... and to provide granular data on each of these Sub-Verticals." i don't think that you should spend a lot for it in those areas as the money will be better used for doctors, nurses, medical equipment, medicine, equipment and other stuff.

    this does not include private it spending that may also complement some items as what the public sector is spending.

    * sorry, i don't know much of html and don't want to spend time learning how to format the tables properly as i redid this comment and calculations for a couple of times.

    • Japan? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by atomicstrawberry ( 955148 )
      I notice that Japan isn't included in these figures. Odd that Australia and New Zealand have been shoved in with Asia, yet one of the major countries in the consumer technology sector is absent. Their tally should be reasonably high, I'd imagine.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by solferino ( 100959 )
      Thanks for your total spending figures.
      I find these two interesting:

      Australia 3,893,928,499.34
      Taiwan 1,035,284,044.48

      I am Australian and have lived in Taiwan for a year. The two countries have similar total populations (Taiwan a few million more than Australia's 20m) and similar standards of living. Yet Taiwan spends nearly a quarter what Australia does.
    • One quick, interesting point: (except for Indonesia) seems like the lower you go, the more likely you will find places to outsource to. Hmmmm.
  • I'm continually stunned with the ignorance of history and economics that people are capable of suffering. Tax and spend plans are not going to solve any problems. You cannot get out of a hole by digging deeper. Politicians and their flunkies are always looking for a magic pill that will improve their nation's standing on some issue or another, and history has shown that every time they do, they just retard the progress and rate of growth in their own countries. Dirigisme doesn't work. You want to impro

  • Flawed study criteria (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @12:35AM (#15967559) Journal
    IT Spending cannot be directly related to the spread of IT and it's benefits. Let's take the case of the Indian Railways (the biggest employer in the World) and the Indian Insurance business (a mammoth organisation).

    The ticket reservation system in Indian Railways uses a dumb-terminal front end attached to dot-matrix printers, with Unix systems in the backend... I'm not sure about the databse and the progrmming language though. Now, IT spending-wise, the Railways probably spends about 1% (no kidding) of the money that would've been needed for a Windows-Citirx-thinclient-IBM consulting-broadband-interconnect-firewall-data-ce nter solution for the same performance. IBM's efforts to sell multi-purpose thin-clients and migrate to DB2 on AIX have failed. (The online reservation system allegedly runs .Net and Flash, and is quite slow and clumsy though).

    The Life Insurance Corporation of India recently decided to shut down Windows on all their systems and networks (they were fed up with the ServicePack Oriented Architecture) and tied up with RedHat for thousands of PCs. A ten-fold savings on licensing costs (and IT spending) ensued.

    So basically, I would reckon the study methodology and criteria were flawed. Asia has a much bigger ratio of Linux and Unix systems (and Lotus Notes as well, surprisingly) compared to the rest of the World. The much higher GDP and purchasing power distorts the study method.

    For instance, a licensed version of MS Office Professional would easily be 3-months wages of a middle-class Indian. This is NOT the right way to compare IT penetration and usage.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by homer_s ( 799572 )
      The ticket reservation system in Indian Railways uses a dumb-terminal front end attached to dot-matrix printers, with Unix systems in the backend... I'm not sure about the databse and the progrmming language though.

      An IBM exec in India told me that the database was DB2 - had no way of verifying it though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kabocox ( 199019 )
      So basically, I would reckon the study methodology and criteria were flawed. Asia has a much bigger ratio of Linux and Unix systems (and Lotus Notes as well, surprisingly) compared to the rest of the World. The much higher GDP and purchasing power distorts the study method.

      Great, that'll mean that Asia will really be ahead of US in the long term.
  • Maybe it would help if we relocated NZ off the coast of Ireland so people wouldn't get confused so much ;-) Europe + Polynesia + random extra bits = New Zealand.

  • The thing is.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by paxmaniac ( 988091 )
    You can probably get 200 Indian programmers for the price of one Australian programmer.

    Comparing raw dollars (especially dollars per capita) just isn't very informative.
    • Funny thing tho, the cool kids (IIT grads) aren't living in India, they're over here on H1-B's (or your local equivalent). Why work for $10,000USD/year when you can easily go elsewhere and make 10 times that amount? The answer ,of course, is that you've just hired 200 very green and/or very incompetant devs. That project wasn't mission critical was it?

      You can probably get 200 Indian programmers for the price of one Australian programmer. Comparing raw dollars (especially dollars per capita) just isn't

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dionysus ( 12737 )
        Why work for $10,000USD/year when you can easily go elsewhere and make 10 times that amount?

        $10,000 USD in India probably last longer than $100,000 USD in the US.
  • 1) There are a lot more people in India and China. 2) Australia and New Zealand are more developed country.

  • But how do they invest in IT? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jandersen ( 462034 ) on Thursday August 24, 2006 @05:03AM (#15968301)
    New Zealand and Australia investing up to USD 200 per capita on IT, while India and China spend a dismal USD 1

    The important thing here is not so much how much they invest in IT, but how they invest it. I mean, seeing how the public sector wasts billions of GBP here in UK on badly designed, badly executed mammoth projects that invariably miss all deadlines, go over budget by several orders of magnitude and then fail, I would rather have them not spend the money at all.

    One big factor in why these projects always fail is that IT jobs in the public sector are underpaid, compared to the private sector, so they mostly get the people who couldn't cut in the private sector. And those people make one stupid decision after another. I'd rather see the public IT salaries top those of the private sector; that way at least there would be a chance that our tax money isn't just wasted by incompetents.
  • Compared to cost of living, $1 in china probably buys you the same as $200 in Australia, so maybe they are spending the same in actual effort.
  • There is prob a big spending difference because the asian outsource firms (like Infosys) leverage Western company IT infrastructures they contract for. All they need is a sweet internet connection. As long as somebody is spending money... meh...
  • I am not sure but somewhere in per-Capita comes the picture of population.

    while India and China spend a dismal USD 1

    India and China both have a Billion plus population. LOL. Not sure about China but 80% of Indian popultion is still in the villages.

    Anyway, just today I covered on my blog how Telecom MNCs have benefited from globalization and how Indian companies are using their technology and services :-)

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