Intel Developing New Chip Designs in India 306
An anonymous person noted that "Intel Corporation, the $39-billion largest chip maker in the world, is developing new chip designs and processors at its India development centre to roll out the next generation of notebooks and servers, says a top company official."
Is it really for cost savings? (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet the Blue Guys are happy about this... (Score:4, Interesting)
fer'ners (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is only going to continue... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I agree with you. What you propose (Fair Trade vs. Free Trade) is what the European Union has done. There are very specific criteria for membership; items such as worker and environmental protections are included. Here's the wikipedia entry on the criteria - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria [wikipedia.org].
Unfortunately, the US has embraced the "Race to the Bottom" approach and we now can see the results. Globalization is a mixed blessing; on the one hand it does raise GDP for participating nations, but on the other hand, it can have serious repercussions. Of course, I'm expecting to be flamed and modded down now for attempting to be truly "fair and balanced".
Sign of weakness? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, there can be reasons for that. The American car makers are crashing because they should have fired their engineering staffs a couple of decades ago and simply started over. But has Intel really reached a similar point?
Re:Hi, my name is Lizzy Faire! (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously as you offshore the workers, you end up offshoring the first-line managers next. At some point, it becomes sensible to offshore some second-line managers, and so on. This continues up the chain, until those left see the logical conclusion, circle the wagons, and say, "It doesn't make financial sense to offshore any higher-level jobs." Or course they mean, "financial sense for me" to offshore higher-level jobs.
But by this time, there will be a lot of experience - some of it quite high-level, walking around the streets of India, which another post has suggested has more of a revolving door than Silicon Valley in its heyday. So how long before fully Indian semiconductor companies emerge? They won't have the Intel name, but that isn't as important outside the US and Europe, especially at a much lower price.
Once we've offshored every aspect of technical operation, what's left? Is the corner office really that valuable, especially outside the US?
Re:The TFA is more accurate (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Work Visa (Score:5, Interesting)
lets thank all our elected republicans for helping out the middle class families out there /end sarcasm. .|..
Traditionally, Republicans have been protectionist. Free-trade Republicans are a new breed. There are also free-trade Democrats.
This is a good thing.
goodbye american jobs
Not true. Granted, if an Indian engineer can design a circuit for $15 an hour and an American won't work for less than $50, the American is going to lose his job to the Indian.
However, free trade also creates jobs, especially in my home state of Wisconsin. With tariffs and other protections removed that make offsourcing and exporting possible, our dairy industry now sells a great deal overseas. This is especially true for the smaller farmers - they didn't have the infrastructure the corporate farms did to effectively deal with trade barriers; now, they have a market to sell to that they didn't before.
Trade works both ways. American engineers may lose jobs in the short run, but everyone who uses a computer will benefit from cheaper microprocessor prices. European farmers may lose jobs, but the EU gets cheaper milk. Although it sure sucks to be the Engineer, the offshoring, in effect, made the rest of the world richer - if everything costs less, you can buy more than you could before, even though you don't make any more money.
Free trade isn't as simple as "goodbye American jobs" - it's a choice between protecting a few industries or seeing a widespread reduction in the price of, well, everything.
Re:Work Visa (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems to me to be a huge negative from a few different angles.
1. Energy usage- is it really a good thing to be selling parishable dairy products a half a world away at all, essentially creating huge multinational corporations, where millions of local dairies served before and created a fresher product for the mere reason that it didn't have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to you?
2. If we're selling dairy overseas, what is happening to local dairies overseas? Are they losing their market to US Government subsidised dairy products?
3. And what happens to those overseas dairy farmers? Do they end up coming here to compete with us for land and resources (by coming here illegally, as the Oxacan Chicano Indians did when the same thing happened in Mexico) or by committing suicide (as farmers in India are doing)?
None of this seems very positive to me.
Re:Is it really for cost savings? (Score:2, Interesting)