I divide the purchases by classifying continued purchases by how it affects the business that I am in. If it is a commodity to my business then I just pay the SaaS fee. There are already a lot of competitors out there and software businesses are high fixed cost, low variable cost businesses. In other words, they do not really have the perceived pricing power one might think, even with switching costs. On the other hand any software that is part of what makes our company's service delivery unique, we try to own as much as possible with one time purchases and sponsored development. We want to own that intellectual asset for future returns due to those assets.

By and large, commodity software for most common retail business would be things like:
Payroll and accounting software
A differentiating software might be
Data gathered on user purchase behavior using opensource ETL tools.

What is different about SaaS software is that everything is bundled in the cost and that is a problem. A company that never allows their product to be complete at certain milestones and allow customers to rest at that version create a situation where both company directions can be fluid. Companies are frequently made to sell themselves and the vision can change. Also company priorities change. One SaaS vendor I worked with increases prices every year, but also decides that some issues I report get fixed early and some as late as 6 months to a year later. That causes a lot of extra cost to our company in an indirect way. Much of that can be held at bay if we are not forced to upgrade. SaaS companies can do a lot of practical things to fix the imbalance. For example, simply separating fixes from content updates.

Most valuable things in life take time to grow and flourish. People are emotional and will frequently be overly optimistic or pessimistic in the short term, but even something as mundane as home construction here in the US takes at least 6 months with perfect weather and full agreement with everyone in the value chain. Real value takes longer.

What my parents told me growing up comes to mind:
http://biblehub.com/numbers/32... - "...you may be sure that your sin will find you out."
At least anyone with fear of finally being exposed as dishonest has a warning sign to make amends with their partner.
No one can fault you for the truth, although there may be consequences for the truth.

Mikogo is the only "Gotomeeting" software that I know of that works well on Linux. That will allow you to switch between presenting your desktop or flip to allow viewing of their Windows desktop.
Skype works okay for conversations, but I would probably buy a VoIP box to carry around like iTalkBB www.italkbb.com or the one from Vonage for telephone stuff.

New guys do not get senior pay. People with experience usually command higher wages.
You can get people out of school fairly priced to their abilities. That fair price can be significantly under what an accomplished senior engineer will make.

The best question is, "Who are you fishing for and why?"

Hopefully your company is willing to spend the coin for the experience implied by this article.
If not, your company may see the time slow down as worth it. From an investment side, management must consider timing of future cashflows and likelihood they will arrive (risk). Slow and steady can win the race, despite how frustrating it can be to 'bring someone else up to speed.'

When I observe this situation, usually a pattern emerges where a developer is hired during the expansion of a project or other effort. In other words, someone is hired to fill a gap. Usually I have not seen an ongoing effort by the person hired to discover how they 'do' provide extra value in a tangible way and advertise that. Some companies have internal job postings which should allow the switching of jobs to happen where pay raises can come into question. Those that do not really need their technical staff to venture out and try to cross train with the business folk they serve. It's a good way to 'discover need' and then figure out how to provide. The new hire is the only person selling themselves during the moment. Most IT departments I have seen are very passive in terms of aggressively seeking out ways to solve problems of the businesses that pay them. That is not saying they do not do a fantastic job at what they currently do, but business people have new challenges every day. The theme here is focusing on meaningful problems and communicating the ability to solve them to people who need the problem solved and are able to pay. Not rocket science. ALL business problems have one of two outcomes. They affect revenue or expenses. If developers understand that and figure out which direction of those two their contribution influences, it becomes a selling tool or redirection of effort tool. Just my two cents..

When I lived in China, I subscribed to a SSH tunnel service. I would setup a small application on my machines that would open a tunnel and funnel that traffic out from America. Be careful trying things like Onion. My financial trading software blocked me when their IT department detected requests shifting from IP to IP from various countries. It looks very suspicious. It's worth the fee paid to the SSH tunnel operators because you don't have to pay for a network connection in the US and they handle all the technical junk on the backend. Also since these service offerings are not super clear on China's Radar, chances of getting the IPs and ports blocked are really small. There is an advantage to being a small fish.

I'm currently living in China and have been for the last year and a half. I haven't experienced any kinds of slow downs with Google. My girlfriend does go to google.cn, but I think that's used by Google themselves. Another thing about financials.... if you haven't checked the ADR for Baidu (BIDU), is at $314 per share with a PE of 152.28. I remember when I checked this in I think September at ~$230 per share with a PE of ~230ish. They apparently had some super earnings growth. Any way you look at it, this is a huge financial gain for Google if they do still own shares, even a small amount. Their earnings would be further propped up buy having Baidu's revenues in RMB. (Dollar has declined somewhere in the 9% range this year).

If you think BIDU can actually get a 1 up on Google, then buy the ADR.

I have not taken a look at either company's 10-K yet to answer all the w-questions.

In a general sense, every major country has business investments here earning money for Chinese people, not just their respective home nations. There is no doubt in my mind that China wants to lead and have its local companies move to a number 1 standing in the world. There is a balance there and the big investment players in China are too big to be messed with in a meaningful sense of the word. If China were to undermine some large multinationals, many other multinationals would re-assess their risk and there would be higher cost of doing business in China as apposed to somewhere else.

As an American, it worries me that many of the news broadcasts from Bloomberg and others mention such and such a company earning 50% of it's profits from developing and emerging markets. This worries me because in a sense it says, the value for the company is being created outside of the United States. Those people in America who are part of that value creation process by the wise allocation of capital resources will be safe from job cuts, but the others are in danger of restructuring. (Please excuse getting a bit off topic here).