>>What is going to happen when China does start working on high skill high margin stuff?
Chinese manufacturing was a threat, Indian outsourcing industry was also a threat. But the nature of threats was different. Chinese manufacturing and Indian software services was a threat ONLY because of their cost factor. And that was hardly any advantage these big nations had over the US, and the US didn't care because the day a cheaper alternative was found- It would mean the end for both China and India.
The scary situation is when you find populations of the scale of China and India. With all their human resources, desperateness, passion and energy attack the big-ticket problems in the world.
That is the kind of scenario which builds next super powers which replace the existing super powers.
I find the scary situation that the educated, passion filled people might not be able to sustain the uneducated, solely desperate people when all these 100s of millions of factory workers are no longer needed (for whatever reasons, but robots seems likely). In India, the people I knew from 10-15 years ago who started booming software companies are firing / closing their doors because the prices are the same (or higher) as in parts of europe and the US while the quality definitely is not. The latter is communication barriers, culture etc, whatever, it happens a lot though. My friends are really desperate from work, unable to provide the higher quality requested by companies in the west while, on the other hand, also unable to provide the prices which makes lower quality attractive (to some).
I'm more into software development than manufacturing, but I would assume similar (and other) cracks are appearing in China as well. Especially with cheap(er) robots (also used in the west) and optimized factory processes.
Do you know examples, besides these inventors which are (probably) exceptions, of Chinese passion/energy attacks? The problems we hear about usually are huge projects which either are abandoned after building (unsafe, unusable) or destroy massive parts of nature and get people thrown out of their houses by the state. Both I wouldn't consider attacking big-ticket problems; former does nothing, the latter replaces one problem with a few others. But that might just be propaganda which is peddled in the west to 'educate us'. I'm eager to see good examples.
>In India, the people I knew from 10-15 years ago who started booming software companies are firing / closing their doors because the prices are the same (or higher) as in parts of europe and the US while the quality definitely is not.
I don't know from where you got this data. Because I'm an Indian, staying in Bangalore. If anything the demand for programmers is only increasing by the day. There is lot of demand of work inside India. These days you don't have to get the project from the west.
For every failed case of an outsourced project I can list tens of successful project executed at shoe string budgets. And beyond all this, you think outsourcing was scary? According to me outsourcing was only a way to get an entry into these things.
I've been meeting and talking to a lot of entrepreneurs here around in Bangalore circles. And I can tell you the product and start up scenario is set to go places in the time to come. Its no longer your 'college -> outsourcing company' situation anymore. There are plenty of awesome folks doing start ups. There will be failures initially, but progress is the only forward. Besides the India as a nation is itself rapidly transforming itself. Its a big nation and has its own problems, but with every year things are only getting better and will continue to.
I don't much about China, but I see things might be pretty much the same there.
>>Both I wouldn't consider attacking big-ticket problems
There are plenty of big-ticket problems we doing here in India. We had our first mission to moon, another planned to launch soon. There is also a mars mission. Some years back this would be unimaginable without the help of a country like US.
But again we are only getting self sufficient by the day.
Well, the 'data' I have comes from friends from Bangalore, Jaipur and other cities who have(or had) their own outsourcing company. I know there is plenty of work and that it's growing (in both India and China btw). And I don't think outsourcing is or was scary. I made some nice companies based on it and made very good friends.
I'm happy to hear people are transforming themselves. What i'm referring to is the difference between 15 years ago and now ; the 'West' expects general higher quality from the outsourcing companies and that seems painful. Sure projects can 'succeed' as you say, but that says not much about quality. If something 'works' it can succeed short term and then fail later.
I have a lot of examples (even from the embedded world where it does get scary), but HP outsourced an internal product (in Java) to India. My colleagues at the time were asked to check the code coming back from India (and HP didn't outsource to small companies and didn't pay little either); not only did (and does) it not work, the code was almost completely unreadable. One of my Pet Peeves being that a lot of Bachelor and Master of CS guys and girls in India have no idea what recursion is and so you see incredibly complex, huge methods in the code which try to solve a problem (directory traversal for instance) which can be solved in a few lines using recursion. An often used attack is to start with some while(true) and then stack up if statements and a number of variables to try to keep up where you are until you have 'enough depth'. And this not only once; the codebase is littered with it. Without sensible comments or method naming, it's very hard to figure out what the intent was.
Maybe this is rare instead of normal (I don't think so); i'm just saying that this is what other companies send us to 'make it work'. And this is what I have seen from my Indian friend's companies as well. Next to that my friends who are Indian and live there fulltime say this as well. They don't really see it as a problem generally because, like you say, projects succeed despite of it. Until they go out of business (and go work for a company big enough to not care (yet?) about this).
Are there any good sites showing off Indian software startups? Would be great to see that.
Though a job board, its a good indication who is hiring and what they are hiring for.
I don't deny that there are bad programmers out here in India. But that hardly says anything about the situation here. If you look it, then you will see the problem of bad programmers is there almost in every country.
There are bad programmers in the US. But that is irrelevant to the fact that companies like Google have started there.
You have bad programmers everywhere of course. The thing is that when the prices per hour go up you expect the quality to go up. I know that when I pay $50/hour in parts of Europe, Russia, Ukraine I'm getting high quality professionals (depends on the region; it goes anywhere from E40-E300/hr). When I pay $50/hr in India, this has not been my experience at all; price seems to be quite unrelated to quality. The prices rose from $5 to $50 in some cases, but the quality remains quite bad. But don't get me wrong; i'm not trying to say that all coders in India are bad (I know this would be a very stupid remark indeed); i'm only talking about the mass outsourcing factories I worked with in India (for clients, paid by clients) compared to the EU/East EU ones. I was trying to make the mass out sourcing link argument which i'm seeing; price/quality are (starting to) be off compared to the EU so people looking to hire are more prone to hire locally.
China replacing US as a superpower power would only be the world returning to its normal balance: from the dawn of time till two centuries ago, China represented half of the world's GDP...
This contradict partially what I read somewhere else, I'll check. But if you will, we can say the normal balance of the world is three third, China, India and Europe.
Chinese manufacturing was a threat, Indian outsourcing industry was also a threat. But the nature of threats was different. Chinese manufacturing and Indian software services was a threat ONLY because of their cost factor. And that was hardly any advantage these big nations had over the US, and the US didn't care because the day a cheaper alternative was found- It would mean the end for both China and India.
The scary situation is when you find populations of the scale of China and India. With all their human resources, desperateness, passion and energy attack the big-ticket problems in the world.
That is the kind of scenario which builds next super powers which replace the existing super powers.