For once, tech gurus may be guilty of underplaying how much the Internet will change your life.
Especially if you live in a moderate-to high-income country, are of modest to moderate intelligence, and work at a service industry job which can be done more cheaply -- and possibly better -- by some bright eager beaver in Bangalore.
Or Madras, Delhi, Bombay -- anywhere in India to which globally-active banks, insurance companies, airlines or credit card companies shift their most labor-intensive operations.
The telecommunications revolution has made it possible for functions such as insurance claims processing, accounting, order taking or customer support to be done from anywhere.
The economics of global competition will ensure they are.
Tech researcher Gartner recently forecast that by December more than 80 percent of multinationals will use IT outsourcing to save money, overcome skills shortages or increase flexibility.
Without a doubt, much of that work is headed to India.
"Today India is the dominant player, with a greater than US$6.2 billion [IT service] export industry, more than 900 software export firms and approximately 415,000 English-literate IT professionals," the report said.
Gartner Dataquest forecasts the market for this type of service, which the industry calls global business process outsourcing, (BPO), will grow to US$543 billion in 2004, at a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent.
BPO operations in India are being set up by listed Indian companies, such as Infosys Technologies and Wipro Ltd, and by foreign multinationals themselves.
"Companies like GE, American Express and British Airways have successfully demonstrated the benefits of the model, with total savings of a few hundred million dollars between them," Kandathil Jacob, a visiting professor at the management school at Bombay's Indian Institute of Technology, wrote recently.
Citibank, Dell Computers, Oracle and Lufthansa are among the other firms that have set up service centers in India, staffed by college graduates delighted to land a job paying 10,000 to 12,000 rupees (US$204 to US$245) a month.
The stream of service industry jobs flowing to India should increase now that its telecom market is deregulated, cutting charges in the one area where the nation -- as a remote service center -- compared poorly internationally.
Its phone rates were among the world's highest. A call from India to the US costs nearly a dollar a minute, about three times what a caller there paid to ring India.
In April, India cut rates for conventional phone services overnight by deregulating its international phone market.
The government also authorized Internet telephony, or Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP), which has greater ramifications for the international labor market.
The reason is simple.
"Soft switches deliver distance-insensitive services. Long distance goes away as a cost factor," said Arnold Englander, vice president for product planning and strategy at VocalTec Communications Ltd, a Jerusalem-based leader in the VoIP software industry.
Englander told a recent seminar on VoIP that with a Net-based phone system, an employee in Delhi would dial the same number of digits -- maybe four -- to ring a colleague in the same building or in Bonn.
"The cost, the access, the sound, would be the same."
As Englander noted, with distance no longer a technical or cost factor, decisions where to place call centers can be made entirely on other grounds.
Such as where wages and real estate costs are lowest. New Delhi was recently rated the world's second cheapest place to live, among 134 cities surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Bombay ranked 126th.
The cost of setting up operations can be cut further by renting or leasing space, computers and telecoms gear.
Some business groups estimate a multinational can typically recoup within a month the cost of setting up 10,000-strong operations in India.
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
LANDSLIDES POSSIBLE: The agency advised the public to avoid visiting mountainous regions due to more expected aftershocks and rainfall from a series of weather fronts A series of earthquakes over the past few days were likely aftershocks of the April 3 earthquake in Hualien County, with further aftershocks to be expected for up to a year, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Based on the nation’s experience after the quake on Sept. 21, 1999, more aftershocks are possible over the next six months to a year, the agency said. A total of 103 earthquakes of magnitude 4 on the local magnitude scale or higher hit Hualien County from 5:08pm on Monday to 10:27am yesterday, with 27 of them exceeding magnitude 5. They included two, of magnitude
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
Taiwan’s first drag queen to compete on the internationally acclaimed RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅), was on Friday crowned the “Next Drag Superstar.” Dressed in a sparkling banana dress, Nymphia Wind swept onto the stage for the final, and stole the show. “Taiwan this is for you,” she said right after show host RuPaul announced her as the winner. “To those who feel like they don’t belong, just remember to live fearlessly and to live their truth,” she said on stage. One of the frontrunners for the past 15 episodes, the 28-year-old breezed through to the final after weeks of showcasing her unique