John Dvorak, one of my favorite curmudgeons, has a great rant in his column in PC Magazine about offshoring. One of his comments that really hit home with me is that “...I hear all the time that coders in India are cheaper and better. What makes them better? Have there been some blockbuster Indian software programs that somehow I missed?...You'd think some killer apps would have come out of India by now, as they have from Europe, the U.S., Japan and even Russia.” I think the problem is that initiative and imagination, something that we value for the most part in the U.S. and Europe, are not something that is encouraged at all in India. When I think of truly great coders that I have encountered by name, I think of folks like Hungarian Tamás Miklós (creator of Aida32 and now CTO and Executive Vice President of Lavalys), Bosnian Irfan Skiljan (creator of IrfanView), Finn Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) and that insanely great American coder Steve Gibson (way many programs from Gibson Research Corp) and I don't think of a single Indian name; all the Indian names I think of in this industry are on the business side of things, like Sanjay Kumar at CA (formerly). Another thing Dvorak bemoans (and rightfully so) is the fact that American companies are having their Indian employees fake American accents and refuse to tell you where they are located. Offshoring is a very real and serious threat to the IT industry and is one reason we are encouraging our students to go into security and networking—guys and gals in India can't plug cables into a hub in Des Moines. Unfortunately as coding, support and system administration go offshore, I can see a time in the future when the necessary in-house IT staff—there to manage the outsourcing and make the strategic IT decisions for the firm—are all network guys, because that's the only in-house staffing left to promote from! Are John Dvorak and I the only ones who find this a really scary prospect? Of course not, but there don't seem to be many forces marshalling to stop this, and no, I won't vote for that consumate liar John Kerry just because he promises to stop jobs from going offshore. But frankly, I'm worried, and you should be too.

There is a growing interest evident in the emerging field of Bad Art. Three galleries of bad art now have online components, complete with the expected thumbnail-to-big-picture features one has come to expect from online art museums. Three of the institutions—The Museum of Bad Art, the Ohio Bad Art Guild and the Institute for the Preservation of Bad Art—are featured in an article in U.S Airways' Attache Magazine. Read it and weep.
[MOBA via the Internet Scout Report]

Hey, I've been saying this all along: people are going to get really fed up with Microsoft's ridiculous licensing policies or their ongoing failure to provide a stable, secure operating system. Or maybe they'll hang in there until they find out that their existing applications are incompatible with Windows 2006 or whatever they're going to call Longhorn. All it will really take is for someone to put out a really professional Linux desktop like, oh, perhaps a Novell SuSE/Ximian hybrid or even Big Blue Linux. Anyway, here's what we hear from one gathering of gurus:

SAN DIEGO—Linux on end users' desktops remains largely elusive for enterprises, but the open-source operating system could become more attractive as the demands of IT departments shift, said panelists and attendees at the Desktop Linux Summit 2004 here.

Microsoft Corp., the maker of the dominant Windows operating system, and other proprietary software vendors themselves could cause the spark for broader desktop Linux adoption by forcing IT departments into tougher licensing stances or costly upgrade cycles, said Linux backers and IT consultants at the conference on Friday. Read More...