Microsoft to Invest $1.7 billion in India

piyushranjan writes "Bill Gates has announced that Microsoft will invest $1.7 billion in India over the next four years to expand its operations. The fund would also be spent in making India a major hub of Microsoft's research, product and application development, services and technical support for both global and domestic companies. Microsoft plans to create 3000 more jobs at India, taking it's headcount at India to 7000."

Reuters news story on CNet

[anandpur]

Reuters news story on CNet

http://news.com.com/2102-1014_3-5985482.html?tag=s t.util.print/ [com.com]

Re:Heck...

[pubjames]

I know you're only joking, but the annual GDP of India (according to the CIA world factbook) is $ 3,319,000,000,000, so it's worth considerably more than Microsoft...

Re:Defensive move

[halo8]

OR
you could not be paranoid tinfoil hat n00b and realize that Indian labour is cheaper than North American labour.

its always about linux, OSS, and being evil with you people. theirs more to buisness than just OSS and Linux

\course.. i think offshoring is pretty evil in and amonst itself

Re:Are you sure that the GDP

[pubjames]

Well, the CIA says so:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ranko rder/2001rank.html [cia.gov]

It doesn't surprise me, but I think that table may shock the many Americans who have a very distorted view of the world!

Re:Are you sure that the GDP

[BreadMan]

It's the per-head numbers that matter, absolute GDP doesn't really tell you that much.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ranko rder/2004rank.html [cia.gov]

India comes in at #154 (out of 232) with per captia gdp of $3,100. The entries at the top of the list are generally involved in banking\trading, that seems to make sense given the nature of that business.

There's a large positive relationship between the capital stock of a country and the per capita GDP. That's what drives the high incomes in countries in the the US/UK/EU/Asia regions. In general, the higher the per capita capital stock, the higher marginal return on capital. I couldn't find any good comparative data to cite, most of the World Bank info was from the last 1980's.

Re: That's not the right GDP figure

[jschwart37]

That's exactly the point: $1.7 billion dollars goes a lot further in India than in the US.

Moreover, Microsoft is spending $1.7 billion actual US dollars -- not $1.7 billion dollars at Indian purchasing power parity. If you want to compare the purchasing power parity numbers, you should first change the $1.7 billion actual dollars into PPP dollars. Then it's about $8.5 billion as measured by PPP.

Re:for that kind of money

[miffo.swe]

I had the pleasure to talk to support this other week. I needed the lpd name of a Xerox Document Centre 440. I know for a fact that almost all printers who are net enabled do have a lpr que name, its just not printed on todays sorry excuses for manuals. This copier/printer do have a lpr que name.

I spoke to four different people on tech support who at first thought i was talking about something in MS Windows. I tried in vain to explain what i needed to know, why, that their machine did really have an lpr que and no, it was not a Windows application. I further explained that i needed the name to be able to connect the printer to an Novell Open Enterprise. The fast answer was ofcourse "-we dont support open enterprise". Well i didnt want support on OES, all i wanted was the name of the friggin lpr que. Fourth call i called it a day and swore to never ever have anything to do with a Xerox machine of any kind ever again. Looked around a bit and found the lpr que name of every net enabled printer in history on Novells own site. How is it possible that a tech support dont know that lpr even exist? This wasnt just a consumer support, it was the support for big customers.

Support like that are cheap but really worthless for the consumer.