Week 7 Reflection

This week part of the study involved the concept of off shoring and outsourcing work to other companies.  This concept has become of particular interest due to the development and growth of the internet, as it now allow for offshoring or outsourcing of technical jobs rather then just manufacturing jobs as had been done previously for cars or electronics.  A main difference with these two styles of offshoring is the level of technical ability required by the worker.  The manufacturing level can be done by mostly unskilled laborers once the factory is in place.  The IT level work requires the workers to be trained to a higher level to deal with both the computer technical skills as well as the possible customer service skills which may include language courses.

These two different levels also allow for a discussion of how they effect the local economy of the country in which they are placed.  Many argue that the manufacturing helps the developing country and it is true to a certain extent.  But there is also the possibility for the manufacturing country to simply pull out the factories and move them to another country that is less developed if it is better for the company.  It may be better for the company to due this as it would allow them to avoid certain labor laws or perhaps a rising demand for higher wage due to a growth in the standard of living.

The higher trained IT jobs present a different version of this though.  Due to the need for a higher level of training it is better for the offshoring company to move into a country such as India that has the education already in place but still is not as developed as some Western countries to help defer costs.  But due to the nature of these jobs, it helps to grow the middle class rather then the working class as the jobs pay more and provide more advanced skills.  A person that gets trained for an IT position could then uses the skills to develop technical jobs within their home country.  This is in contrast to the manufacturing position that requires the funding of a large company to operate the factory.  The technical position could start small by providing online services that have little start up cost in comparison.

These are only a few thoughts on the subject but this topic has incredible depth to explore.

Week 6 Reflection

Mid Term Week

Week 5 Reflection

In week five we looked at the "dot com bubble" which I found interesting as I had never looked at it form a business perspective before.  I understood that a lot of the companies had failed but I never took the time to look into why they had failed.  Even with the short amount of time that we have looked into the reasons it struck me that one of the major reasons was the fervor of speculation.  It reminded me of the gold rush, a large amount of people rushing into a situation with very little knowledge about the situation but push themselves on because of the few people that had made money.  I always find it strange that such an important factor of our society can be manipulated to such a degree and cause such havoc, all because one sector of the market rose and fell so quickly.  Another interesting thing that I found out is the lack of business planning on the part of the businesses as well.  Many of the websites focused upon simply gathering as many visitors as possible but didn't think beyond that point.  The businesses never though to try and monetize the amount of visitors they gathered or they tried to maintain the large amount of visitors at a cost to the company.  Thus the company was operating at a loss with no real long term plan to try and turn that around.  It just bewilders me that people would do so much without a "real" plan that would account for things like this.  Why would you start a company without any real idea of how to try and make money with the business.  Of course there are all the dot com businesses that fell apart on purpose because of the greed, but that is a different side of the story.

Week 4 Reflections

For this week our mini project was to investigate twitter.  Many of my classmates made the point that they really didn't see any point for twitter for an average user.  They equated the service as something that allowed a person to shout out that they just ate breakfast or took a shower.  In other words a useless service.  I would tend to agree with them for the most part, especially if the service is used in that manner.  But I made the point that Twitter has allowed some amazing events to occur such as live tweeting from the revolutions that were occurring in Libya and Egypt.  Even something not as extreme as that can occur with tweets from the Occupy Wall Street movement allow a view into the event for those who are not part of it or can not be there themselves.  I think that something like Twitter has to be judged on what it can be used for rather then what it is used for a majority of the time.  To try and provide a similar example look towards Google.  If you let the auto finish complete some of your searches you will find that people use google for some inane things or at least very, very, strange things.  Google is the most powerful search tool that humanity has created so far and is capable of performing some awesome tasks.  Yet people are searching for cats playing piano pictures.