Who'll develop tech's 'next big thing'?
JACK KAPICA
The high-tech industry is waiting for the Next Big Thing to revive the economy, but when it does arrive, it may not come from the United States, Canada or Western Europe.
Developments in communications have developed to such an extent that the next generation of inventors - after Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - are more likely to be in Bangalore, Karachi, Beijing, St. Petersburg and Manila, says an analyst with the Arlington, Mass.,-based Cutter Consortium.
In fact, Cutter Consortium Fellow Ed Yourdon warned that the trend has been in place for some time - the recent global economic boom, and the associated high-technology boom that prevailed all through the 1990s, may have been delaying factors in the migration of information-technology jobs to India and other centres.
"I think that many of the jobs that are shifting overseas now from the United States are never coming back," Mr. Yourdon said. "Just as nobody seriously expects shoe manufacturers, textile companies or even automobile companies to shift from Mexico and Asia back to the United States.
"That's particularly true for the low-end IT jobs," he said.
Mr. Yourdon made his observations Wednesday in the course of a plea to the U.S. government to stimulate the creation of new jobs in high technology, to create a situation similar to the "seismic shift" of the early 1990s. That's when corporate interests moved from mainframe computers running third-generation programming languages, to client-server technology (PCs with GUI-based workstations).
"Let's assume the economy recovers, some brand-new high-tech 'killer app' will excite the business community in much the same way that client-server technology did a decade ago," Mr. Yourdon said. "If that happens, I predict that there will be a lot of 40- to 45-year-old client-server programmers and even some 30- to 35-year-old Java Web programmers who will find themselves unable to make the transition quickly enough to keep their jobs from being taken by the brand-new generation of college graduates."
The biggest threat, he said, will come from rising Asian high-tech areas.
"The next razzle-dazzle technology may be created in Bangalore," he said. "It could be created in Karachi or Beijing or various other parts of the world, too, but Bangalore now has venture capitalists. That, in itself, is an ominous sign.
"Some of the traditional U.S. venture capital firms are shifting their investments from Silicon Valley to India. And from personal experience, I can tell you that Bangalore also has some very hungry, very ambitious entrepreneurs."
He said that there are "plenty of low-paid programmers who will maintain old COBOL programs as long as you want them to," and that the next generation of Indian IT professionals firmly believes that the United States no longer has a monopoly on innovation.
"And if they're right, which they may well be, then the IT industries of the United States, Canada, England, Western Europe, and other advanced countries are really in trouble."
|
