Apple looking to quadruple software development outsourcing to India - report - Page 3

There is nothing in the man's background, or his statements, that indicates an interest for the software development process, or any other creative endeavor for that matter. This is a guy who by his own admission watches only two TV channels, ESPN and MSNBC, and who by everybody's depiction is a spreadsheet junkie workaholic.

It also turns out that your reply points to exactly zero evidence that the guy knows anything about software development. If you know something I don't, you sure aren't saying it by calling me an "internet dude", which is what we all are around here.

Jobs overseas aren't jobs you'd be likely to see or apply for anyway, so what's the complaint?

I'm willing to see what Apple is able to do in this case. They are unparalleled in their maniacal attention to detail. Give it time.

He also said he was heading for a one-term presidency... I'd settle for the second of the two predictions.

You assume too much.

Don't.

The pattern with nearly all companies is that positions are eliminated in the US when work goes to India, sometimes quite aggressively. That's the whole point usually. In fact the savings per worker is very the basis for the business case outsourcers try to sell.

While it is possible to make the case that manufacture in China is necessary for Apple to be competitive, there is simply no similarly plausible case that Apple needs software development in India to be competitive. Apple is now extremely competitive, thanks to its US-based design and software development.

Software, especially the kind of software Apple develops, is deeply connected with culture. Only a fool could imagine that Apple could have gotten to where it has by doing development in India, Asia generally, and, really, much of the planet outside Silicon Valley. This is not a reflection on the skills, talent, or intelligence of individual programmers, but of the nature of the job.

Working with outsourcing companies is even worse. They have a vested interest to do as little innovation as possible, as they systematically use contract terms to limit the scope of the work they must accomplish to the bare minimum, hence reducing their own costs to improve profitability, as any business will do. They will also use the most basic set of automated tests possible, as their goal is to reach 100% passing statistics, so their people are discouraged from adding tests.

For these and other reasons, really good Indian programmers try to get as far away from the likes of Wipro as they can, as soon as they are able. Apple would be wise to follow their example.

Of course I am. Nothing more, nothing less in this forum. The problem is blowhards like you who don't realize that basic fact.

Oh, and your derisive dismissal of Cook isn't even worthy of a semi-serious response.

Corporations are people*, that they exist as something else is just a legal fiction.

* People, not a person

So you both insult me and avoid coming up with any evidence to back your claim.

Doesn't sound like a very credible response, does it?

By the way, I am sure Cook is highly intelligent and capable in what he cares about. What I am saying is that he has shown no evidence he cares about software development. I stand by that.

You talk about facts, here is one: There isn't a single product made by Apple, either software or hardware, the development of which was led, initiated by, or even shepherded by Cook.

Wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with the recent ban of foreign owned stores being lifted. $400 Million is a small price to pay to open the doors to a population almost 3x the USA. Granted most can't afford Apple products right now but the middle class in India is growing very rapidly.

The influx of $400 Million to the Indian economy is only going to accelerate that growth which will then result in more Apple product buyers. I bet in 3-5 years their investment will have paid off and then some.

You win the prize. I was looking for a foil to work off of to make the point that has been missing in more than one thread today.

You say there isn't a single product traceable to Tim Cook. I say there is a quite obvious one: Apple itself, the company, since he started running the operations ten-plus years ago.

The most complex supply-chain operation in the world, the most vertically integrated and horizontally spread company in history, built under his watch and not so much under Steve Jobs's, I would think. He knows what he is doing with this company.

For all we know, this deal with software companies in India is about establishing a presence in the world's second largest market. Just as an example of stuff we don't know, how many languages will Siri need to know on the Indian subcontinent? Do we really think that the largest software team in Cupertino, the Siri team, should start bringing in programmer/linguists from every language group around the world? Do we not think that the world's number one knowledge company is going to have to source ideas -- software -- from around the world?

Think Different . . . how about Think Global?

I've read all these Comments and got a Sad Feeling... I can't argues with any points, because I don't know as much! But.... I doubt that this India Decision is something that Tim Cook just thought of, or was planning to do after Steve's Passing! It's more likely to be the Continuation of Steve's Long Term Vision....

Then I read this last paragraph

"For all we know, this deal with software companies in India is about establishing a presence in the world's second largest market. Just as an example of stuff we don't know, how many languages will Siri need to know on the Indian subcontinent? Do we really think that the largest software team in Cupertino, the Siri team, should start bringing in programmer/linguists from every language group around the world? Do we not think that the world's number one knowledge company is going to have to source ideas -- software -- from around the world?

Think Different . . . how about Think Global?"

And that cheered me up, because it made sense.... Gotta get the NATIVES doing the Native Language stuff for their own people!!! Besides The Good Will in that country, it's also a Practical Approach! It's Their Language, Their Turf... The Tools are still Made In USA, and the Indians (in this case) take care of the Last Mile!!!! Then they get to Support it!!!

I Suspect that Apple's Competitors, who will be trying to Copy Siri, they will be using Indians too for India, Chinese for China etc...

As long as the Mother Ship, Apple, is in a Firm Control, that's OK by me.... I don't think Apple are Simple Fools, obsessed about Profits ASAP!!! They already have that! Getting a foot in the door in India is HUGE!!! India is more Democratic than China!!! India creates a Nice Leverage for Apple vs. China!

Yes, sometimes I prefer to speak to American Customer Service person most of the time, but you gotta give Indians some credit too. They speak better English than we speak any of their language! To me that's another proof of SMART PEOPLE!!! And on many occasions those Indians tried harder to please, vs our own Americans who sometimes would be less accommodating!!!

Again, I don't think Apple is a bunch of fools... The Sky Is NOT Falling!

And please don't think I am some kind of Apple Blind Trust Fan Boy! Nope, as a matter of fact I've recently had been less than happy with my Apple Care.... But I'll bite my tongue for now.... The recent stories about abuses at Foxconn were no fun to read, but... I've had my issues with some of that journalism.... And I am satisfied with Apple's handling of that case far more than with the media's soundbites....

AAPL Shares are yet another testimony as to the Faith of Many Who Believe in Apple's Bright Future! It's not a crime, nor it's immoral to own any stock, including AAPL!!!! I've seen Regular People who own that stock - bus drivers, clerks... It's not just all wealthy folks with Play Money!!! They have Faith In Apple, and there is nothing wrong with that, and them being rewarded for that!!!

Again, I don't think Apple is a bunch of fools... The Sky Is NOT Falling!

India and China will be a huge part of Apple's Future!!! Eventually all of that will spread worldwide, I hope, and in a way it'll reinforce world piece! Why? Cause people will always crave the latest Apple products, and they'd want them to work! And the world is big enough for Apple and its competitors! Maybe those Competitors will eventually start stealing less from Apple and Innovate for REAL, which would keep Apple on its toes..., awake!!!!

Again, I don't think Apple is a bunch of fools... The Sky Is NOT Falling!

I don't disagree with you. I'm probably just showing my own personal bias, because a company attempted to scam me a while back, it was an American company, but I guess they had outsourced their call operators to India and that's who I spoke to when they called and pulled the scam.

They signed me up for 5 years of magazine subscriptions to all sorts of magazines, and never once did I say yes or agree to anything at all! To make a long story short, everything turned out ok in the end, because of action taken on my part and the situation was resolved after I threatened them with various legal measures. The funny part about the story is that they will never see a dime from me, and I will keep getting a whole shitload of magazines every single month for free. To be honest, it's more of a hassle than anything else, because I don't even want or need them. I end up throwing away 3-4 magazines right into the trash every single week. And I'll keep getting all these magazines delivered for the next 5 years, unless I move or something.

What a waste of paper.

Been catching up on some old Black Adder on YouTube. Just brilliant! But House is lost on me. its probably good but just never watched it. Not even a minute...

Even though I'm American, I have spent considerable time in Europe, and that's where I first saw Black Adder many years ago. I like that show.

It's on Netflix Streaming by the way, every season, every episode.

Really? Perfect late night viewing. Thanks for the heads up.

Here in the UK a large number of our telephone companies, cable providers, banks and utility companies outsource a large number of their functions to India. It has been proven to be a complete turn-off for customers and some of the smarter companies are relocating their call centres/support back to the UK. The standard of service from Indian call centres is incredibly varied and thats once you have got over the language barrier. Not a good move by Apple methinks.

I don't there is any truth to this rumor!

An interesting claim I believe to be false. Can you tell me how Apple is more vertically integrated than say Samsung?

I have a Samsung phone and they made and designed the components it is made from - the processor (Hummingbird), the memory, the AMOLED screen, the battery - designed and made the physical device itself and they even made the OS it runs on, Bada.

Now unless Apple have secretly been designing and manufacturing all their own components, that makes Samsung more vertically integrated than Apple by a wide margin.

IMO this is a very bad idea. All other arguments aside, outsourcing software development to some overseas company is always a bad idea unless you are outsourcing something so trivial it likely already exists in some form or another. End of story. We all know Apple is not trying to reproduce trivial software, and the quality of their software and API's is instrumental to the success of their hardware.

In all the years I've worked as a software engineer I've seen nothing but trouble outsourcing development projects. Contrary to what many people believe, this has little to do with where you outsource to, how much you pay, or what kind of education or background the people doing the work have. The problem is communication, and detaching responsibility for the quality of the code from the people implementing it. It always ends up with some local managers or super-engineers deciding what needs to be done and how, writing it up, and sending it overseas, where the engineers have little to no influence on how they do their job, what the architecture should look like, what features are prioritized and how, and so on.

In my current job we are trying to co-develop complex software with a team based in the Netherlands, and one based in California (incidentally, only about 20 miles from 1 infinite loop ;-), and every time we come to the same conclusion: it hardly works, and time and time again the only way to pull projects afloat, is to fly to CA and fix things with everyone in the same room. So much for 'outsourcing the work'.

I see decisions like this as a big no-no for a company like Apple, that doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the future. I wonder if this is something Apple would have done under Jobs, who appeared to hold software quality as one of the most important preconditions for success. Why Apple thinks they can improve that by outsourcing development really is beyond me

Apple attracts top shelf brainy squared creative types. They want to invent the new UI element, the best IDE on the planet, the next big thing in computing. They don't want to be programming the 50,000th sales database with an Oracle backend and web frontend. Or keeping the Exchange server up. There's lot of boring programming work in this world.

To begin with, let me say, I am an Indian, currently living in India, after several years overseas.

There are a lot of things to complain about with this article - but the India connection by itself is not one of them.

How many people know that Microsoft and Google run major development centers in India? And when I say major, I mean of the order of several thousand employees. And no - they don't do grunt work - they do real development of real products.

My complaint with this article is about the outsourcing - Why should Apple outsource to Infosys and Wipro? Why cant Apple start its own dev center in India? Quite obviously, a company that has so many billions in the bank, and is so obsessed about secrecy is much better off owning its own dev center in India? Even customizing Siri for the Indian accent and for Indian languages is something I would rather Apple did at its own dev center in India, than by parcelling it off to Infosys or Wipro.

Regarding the quality of Indian programming - I have worked as a programmer in several prominent companies overseas - including in the US. Most people rely on Indian programming talent even in their inhouse development. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Indian programming skills. Quite likely, Apple already has a significant number of Indians working in Cupertino. And I am sure Google, Microsoft and Oracle have a lot of Indians too. At the top Investment banks, a lot of the senior technology guys are Indian - and no - they are not hired because they are cheap, or even relatively cheap!

The problems with outsourcing, are just that - problems with outsourcing. I am pretty sure if (for some weird reason) you outsourced a project from India to the US, the quality would be lousy. It is extremely hard to make outsourcing effective. It is of course cheaper in monetary terms - but there are other costs to pay as well. Smart companies outsource only after considering all the costs - not just monetary costs.

I remember a VC joke in the Valley from the dot com days - that you were more likely to be funded if your name was spelt "Krish" (short for Krishnan), than if it was spelt "Chris". That is how well respected Indian IT talent was and is, in the valley. That speaks for skill, and for work ethic.

It is "free market economics" if you consider tax incentives in both India and the US as part of the "free market" at work. Oh... there is also the part of the "free market" wherein 95% of India's education is public i.e. funded through government dollars and India is investing at a higher rate than the US and turning out students with better math and science skills. And did I mention India's "free market" also provides universal healthcare so companies are free of the costs of providing this to their workers. (Much like the super-majority of industrialized countries US companies and labor compete against.)

Sorry but this is not "the free market" at work, this is the result of government policies at the global level.

The "free market" myth is a bedtime story told by economics professors and pundits to college students and wanna-be-but-never-gonna-be-millionaires. It is echoed by CEOs whenever they are looking for removal of regulations or the creation of policies that benefit their company specifically.

Case in point, did we hear any of the mortgage companies clambering to let the full weight of the law and "free market" straighten out the fraud going on in the banking industry last week when they won a sweetheart deal immunizing them from prosecution and shifting most of their losses on to US tax payers? Not a peep. But sure as the sun rises this same group will be arguing for further deregulation under the "free market" banner next week.

If the US wants to return to its former competitiveness it will have to develop policies and incentives that drive education, research and investment both publicly and privately at an even greater level than India and China. This is not accomplished by drinking the "free-market no Government regulation or spending kool-aid" that is currently in vogue, it is done through planning that lasts more than one administration and doesn't shift with every change in democratic or republican majority in congress. Frankly India and China want it more than we do and they have had the policies and priorities in place to make it happen for over a decade.

In general, the lower the taxes, the freer the market.

I now refuse to deal with any companies that have Indian call centres because the level of customer service is appalling. I changed my bank, insurance, mobile phone provider, etc, etc to ones with UK call centres. Thankfully I don't ring telephone support lines anymore I just do a web search to find the answer or go into my local AppleStore. I know a lot of companies are now moving their call centres back to the UK because they are losing so many disgruntled customers.

it is a racist joke to be sure. what if the punch line were: 'likely to be fired' or some other derogatory comment?
it certainly isn't clever.

How can the US or Europe possibly compete with China and India? Would you work for the wages those people get paid? I know I wouldn't.

What's the answer: soaring national debts? huge government spending cuts that result in rioting on the streets? rising unemployment causing millions of people to be homeless and/or in poverty? All so corporations like Apple who already make billions of dollars profit a year can make even more money?

I don't the answer but I don't think this it.

i have had some good interactions with indian based call centers. let's not blame the people for the outsourcing, they are taking jobs that they need just like you and me.
the blame is with the american corporations who aren't satisfied with say 100 billion dollar surplus and don't give a cuss about the majority of people who put that money in the bank for them (north america for example) so rather than invest more here they are looking elsewhere so that they can increase profits even more (but don't expect a drop in price of product) How much are a pair of Nike's these days?

Yes. Or get more productive. (Exhibit A: Greece).


Yes. Corporations owe you nothing. If people want to participate in the wealth creation, they should become shareholders, or retrain/retool themselves to become valuable as employees in firms that make "billions of profits".

I totally disagree. Corporations like Apple should have a social responsibility to the wider community as well as responsibility to their shareholders. Who do you think paid for the education of their well paid workers in Cupertino? American tax payers that's who.

Maybe you think the millions of unemployed people in the US should line up to buy Apple shares and forgo food for a few weeks? Or maybe they should all go out and retrain as iOS programmers. What planet are you on? No what you advocate is simple: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and big faceless corporations pay for the politicians that will keep it that way. What a thoroughly corrupt and morally bankrupt system.

Please donate them to your local kidney dialysis centers. The American Kidney Fund calls me for donations of household items etc. one time they said that dialysis center patients need magazines to read while they are receiving treatment. Other charities would probably take them, or nursing homes.

Whoa whoa whoa here guys, it's still a rumor, we haven't seen WHAT Apple will outsource.
It could be sales data, accounting, possibly backed server stuff ... The highest they would put there would be an iCloud server issue. They can do local dialects for Siri, etc as others have pointed out. there's lots of code to be written that isn't Apple's natural strength.

Let's not get all out on a limb fighting mad over this yet.

Right, guilty of both hyperbole and anachronistic use of an old industrial term, vertical integration, as charged.

Responding to the senseless assertion that Tim Cook has made nothing at Apple, we need new terms for what he and other globally oriented operations magicians do with their logistical empires.

The vertical part I was thinking of pertained to Apple's R&D efforts to control the design and engineering of the hardware they source from everywhere (batteries, processors, screens, chassis, etc.) in contrast to other electronics mfrs who rely more on off-the-shelf solutions, Samsung excepted, plus the huge amount of investment they have in operating systems and applications, in contrast to other mfrs, including Samsung, plus their retail and online sales operations, again in contrast to everyone else in the industry.

So what do we call that kind of integration, which Apple clearly uniquely excels at? Anyway the point is that Tim Cook has built an empire of global logistics, maybe as much as other such managers, but still enough to get his own sort of unstinting recognition. He knows what he's doing, and it is just ridiculous to see the hand-wringing here over strategies that we are all completely ignorant of.

They are going to fill up their new headquarters in Cupertino, spend billions more in the construction of other data centers here and elsewhere, use their capital to start new industries that no one even imagines yet, and maybe even put Americans to work in those new industries. Just shameful the whining that goes on here.

Right on, thank you.

Thank you, it was a miserable experience reading all these hysterical comments for me too. Such emotion, such lack of reason and vision . . .

I guess some people might consider this racist. But this is simply along the same lines that a Kenyan is more likely to be picked for a long distance running team than an Indian. Would you consider that statement racist?

Am sorry if anyone got offended by that joke. I only repeated it to show that Indian programming talent is quite well respected.

And frankly, talking of racism, I wonder if you even read all the posts in this forum... Some of the comments are way worse than what I wrote.

And so it begins. Not satisfied with the vast wealth, profits and esteem its products have earned, Apple has decided to let the greedy bean counters start wrecking the company. As they did once before. I admire and use Apple products. But I find this disgusting. American companies that export good jobs overseas ought to pay a heavy price in U.S. tax penalties, and I think Apple's famous fanboys ought to think twice about their admiration for this company. It's not really all that different from all the others -- as this lamentable decision proves. Don't try to argue that everyone else does it. Apple has been an exceptional company. It should choose to remain exceptional, by bucking the trends and allowing American workers to show their stuff.

Nope.

i wasn't calling you a racist! just that the joke itself was a bit. and yes, i have seen far worse racist comments on the forum!