Massive Chasm In Asia's Public Sector IT Spending 103
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."
Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
(!!??) 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 :)
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Thanks in advance...
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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)
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.
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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)
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...
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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.
Active Directory and LDAP (Score:2)
Remember:
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Complete nonsense. (Score:2)
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
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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)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
Some money is going good places (Score:2)
It gets better (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:Ok, per capital is fine, but gimme actual numbe (Score:1)
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
Re:Ok, per capital is fine, but gimme actual numbe (Score:3, Insightful)
From TFA:
Re:Ok, per capital is fine, but gimme actual numbe (Score:2)
IT spending should be about getting as much as possible for your money, it's not simply about spending as much as possible.
Re:Ok, per capital is fine, but gimme actual numbe (Score:2)
$1 per Capita != $1 per person served (Score:2)
Explore the reasons for the wide gulf (Score:2, Insightful)
Where do I pick up my Nobel?
Re:Explore the reasons for the wide gulf (Score:5, Interesting)
Why spend when you can steal?
2 cents,
QueenB
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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
Or, poorer countries are smarter (Score:2)
Actually, does anyone know of a word processor which doesn't use WYSIWYG mode by default?
In other words... (Score:1)
Massive chasm? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is like saying "massive chasm in public sector IT spending between the US and Mexico!!" - well... yeah, what do you expect?
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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)
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.
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Really? Pulau Selaru (part of Indonesia) is 450km from Darwin. Java (Indonesia) is less than 300 km from Christmas Island (Australia). Tutala, East Timor, is 480km from Bathurst Island, Australia. Sudan is about 1200km from Cyprus, which is the closest part of Europe.
So does "about as far away" mean the same thing as "about 3 times as far away"?
Re:Massive chasm? (Score:5, Interesting)
The 95% of people of Australasia, including the native peoples, who are not Asian.
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.
Which is probably why they're in Australia, and the other 290 million Americans are in North America.
Australia is:
Culturally Asian? - No
Continentially Asian? - No
Linguistically Asian? - No
Racially Asian? - No
In an identity chasm because of previous political issues? Yes
By that, China is a European country.
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.
As does almost everyone outside America.
Europe and Africa share time zones too, and are as similar distance away from each other.
I say call a spade a spade.
Re:Massive chasm? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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You are right there, it does a very good job indeed.
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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)
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?
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>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
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Doesn't talk about purchasing power (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't talk about purchasing power (Score:4, Interesting)
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:
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.
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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
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Yah, a buck vs a buck fifty, or 1 billion vs. 1.5 billion. Seems like a buck fifty per capita goes a long way if you have over a billion people.
Actual Report (Score:1)
Growth prediction based on not-so-deep insight (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
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Also, as I understand it, the sticking point wasn't just the price of wholesale access to the fibre, it was the wholesale pricing difference (cross-subsidy) between city & regional areas. Given the retail costs have to be the same re
Indian public sector spending (Score:1)
different value (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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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.
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Black Hole "Solution" (Score:2)
Flawed study criteria (Score:4, Insightful)
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-c
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.
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An IBM exec in India told me that the database was DB2 - had no way of verifying it though.
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Great, that'll mean that Asia will really be ahead of US in the long term.
we're got more in common with Europe than Asia... (Score:1)
The thing is.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparing raw dollars (especially dollars per capita) just isn't very informative.
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$10,000 USD in India probably last longer than $100,000 USD in the US.
Is that really hard to figure out? (Score:1)
But how do they invest in IT? (Score:3, Interesting)
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... (Score:2)
big diff ..meh (Score:1)
check this out (Score:1)
Size Matters! I mean the sample size ;-) (Score:1)
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