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Comment by ha292 | Hacker News Reader

IBM is playing to two of it's strengths here -- decades of enterprise sales relationships and development manpower, largely based in India. In effect, they're becoming a sales and System Integration channel for Apple. In return they get to give their customers mobile apps that put lipstick on the pigs (Mainframe software, WebSphere/J2EE apps).

What I find amusing is how IBM is spinning this into a "Data and Analytics" play. Granted, it is a bit of marketing BS. But I also suspect that they are trying to please the stock market analysts. It would probably be a highlight in their next earnings call.

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IBM India is a clusterfuck, according to several IBMers I know. Sure, there might be pockets of good devs, but as a whole it's less than zero. I don't blame India, this is most likely a problem caused higher up looking to cut costs above having good teams. Talented guys in India are not that cheap.

Is there any large software company in the industry that has a sizeable development center in India that isn't a clusterfuck?

I've got a sample size of three and all were gong shows.

I blame the outsourcing mindset -- low cost, high volume of people. No focus on quality and accountability. Because the individual engineers I've worked with have on average been excellent. Most of the time though you just get a pool of "resources" rather than actual named people with clear responsibilities.

"largely based in India" == I'm not surprised. Texas Instruments has so many engineers in India that it's joked as "Texas India" these days.

Except for the social-web-developers in SV(facebook,twitter and all that, though Tecent in China is already larger than Facebook in that front too, not to mention Alibaba, Baidu etc), we don't really realize how much of those big companies' products are R&D-ed and manufactured overseas these days from silicon design all the way up. When we wake up, it might be too late already. Sometimes I think the end result will be probably a war, as that's really what US leaves with these days. I hope I'm 100% wrong.

>I hope I'm 100% wrong.

You are. Manufacturing is moving back to the US quickly as labor in China gets more expensive and fuel costs increase.

Fuel costs are not increasing. Shipping across oceans is extremely cheap. Way more more manufacturing is moving US -> China, than the opposite.

Fuel costs are temporarily down because Europe's economy is so weak, but I wouldn't count on fuel staying this low. Also Chinese labor is not such a bargain as wages rise.

Really? Largely based in India? :-(

IBM hasn't reported country-by-country employment data in several years, but it's widely assumed that India has the plurality of their workforce (about 1/3), with the U.S. having their second-biggest headcount. One big part of their business these days is large-scale IT consulting, and while they position themselves as a significantly "premium" provider compared to e.g. Accenture, they probably feel more constrained in just how much of a premium they can charge than they used to, so have been trying to get their cost structure to be not too far from that of their big IT-consulting-shop competitors.

Why is that a bad thing?

IBM has positioned itself as the consulting company that understands the need to be truly global, even running ads on television emphasizing that recently.

What they're pitching for data storage and consulting is just as beneficial for development. Thus, if they're saying one thing and then doing all their dev work in India, that sucks.

No more than Apple is "largely manufactured in China"?

Except Apple products are developed, designed, coded, tested, etc - all in the United States.

The code is. I don't think the hardware itself is QAed in the US.

It definitely is. Huge testing facilities, radio testing, durability, temperature cycling.

All done by Apple in the US.

Do you know if they QA every device or just spot checks for quality of batches? I'd also guess this is only for US-sold devices as it'd be a bit prohibitive to ship them all from China to the US for QA and then ship them to Europe for sale. Is that the case?

I work in manufacturing test, so I can speak to this.

There's a difference between design/development test and manufacturing test. Thermal, drop, vibration, interference, etc. tests are design tests: they verify that units built according to spec are sufficiently reliable. None of the devices you buy have undergone these tests, because the tests are destructive. You wouldn't want to buy an iPhone that had been baked in an oven, or dropped on a concrete floor. It's best to perform these tests near where development happens, to enable fast iteration and easily involve the hardware engineers.

Manufacturing tests verify that individual units have been built according to spec. For example, that there's no electrical shorts, missing connections, cosmetic defects, etc. All of the devices you buy have undergone a large battery of manufacturing tests, which exercised all of the hardware features of the device. These tests are performed at the factory, because it's better to catch these failures early in the assembly process. For example, if a camera module is busted, you want to know before it's installed into an iPhone.

Of course Apple isn't unique in this way. This is just how manufacturing is done.

Thanks for the detailed response. I wasn't as aware of all that as I should be. I'd wager it varies based on the level of the brand, though. So, you could expect this with something like Apple or Samsung or HTC, but lesser brands may not even test their wares before shipping them. My recent purchases of a Monoprice keyboard and network adapter, for instance, both of which were DOA with obvious manufacturing defects.

Only the devices sold in US.

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