Apple's secret outsource: 'Even more software to be made in India' A visit by Apple's CIO to India in January has resulted in some hefty software deals for two Bangalore-based firms, according to The Times of India. Apple's top internal software guy, Niall O'Connor, met with executives from India-based Infosys and Wipro on a visit to Bangalore from 29 to 31 January – and apparently some juicy …
We outsourced a relatively simple biotech application project to Wipro about four years ago. We never did get functional software and I had to put a team of our own engineers on the project to actually complete the application, and yes the requirements were well defined and documented.
Anonymous for obvious reasons.
... if the article didn't explicitly state that the outsourced development work is for back-end software for use by Apple's internal corporate systems, such as retail.
If you're going to crack jokes in an article's comments thread, it's considered good form to actually read the fucking article you're commenting on first.
Apple has a huge cash pile, and a lot of this cash is trapped outside the US, in the sense that the would have to pay tax on it if they move it back into the US, either to spend in some way (eg on wages) or return it to investors. One way to not pay taxes on some of it is to move jobs outside the US and pay the workers there from the cash pile. So Apple has a tax incentive to outsource jobs to India and other countries.
And to go further, Apple isn't the only company to do this, nor is the US the only country.
Would the US be better off if companies were able to transfer overseas profits in tax-free (or at a miniscule rate)? Would that make investing in the US less expensive?
But then no government sees your money as your money, rather as money they allow you to keep.
Outsourcing development swaps short-term cost-saving for long-term loss of expertise and quality. I hope Apple is not going down this route for anything too close to its operating system software or primary software applications. Frankly, I'm disappointed they are doing this at all. I've already seen the gradual slide into mediocrity that has resulted when other firms have taken this approach. Apple survives only by delivering innovative, quality software (the hardware is good, but doesn't really set it apart). I hope we're not seeing a return to the Sculley days when Apple was driven by bean-counters that nearly drove it off a cliff.
If any of the user facing (or their underlying dependencies) OSX has gone to W***Pro Dell, HP and all other PC manufacturers should get together with Microsoft and crack the bubbly.
The _MAIN_ differentiating factor between Apple and the PC crowd - the OS and Apps will now be consigned to the bug-bin of the all familiar high quality production coming from those guys.
Didn't take long for Cook to get co-opted by the globalists who hate American IT workers. They know there is no better way to destroy a productive industry than to flood it with Indian labor. It's the big surpluses American workers create that the bankers are afraid of. Apple closed their R&D in India in 2006 at Jobs' demand. In an MSN TV interview Jobs was asked why Apple didn't try to cut costs through offshoring. Jobs was adamantly opposed to it saying "That would be shortsighted - take care of your top line first - your people and products and the bottom line will take care of itself.
Apple still employs mostly American workers in the US for software. Apple is booming. You can bet Cook's speech AT THE GOLDMAN SACHS meet today had something to do with this. He's been co-opted by the bankers and this will be the beginning of the end for Apple. It may take the Indians 10 years to clean out Apple - that's about how long it took for them to destroy Sun and PeopleSoft. Microsoft is on the way down thanks to them. If Apple does a mass layoff and replacement to India, Apple will be a joke in 5 years. Tim Cook is a saboteur.
Some of them are very bright, in cases exceptionally so.
But you have to remember the goal of out-sourcing is almost always to save money, and you can guess what happens next... So the best of Indian programmers tend not to work for these houses but get much better paid jobs in the west (I know, I have worked with one in the USA).
Apple doesn't work with cut throat margins, their profit ratio is insane, machines are expensive but they run a good, bug free Unix desktop and cost of operating system added to the hardware.
And now we hear, operating system and Applications are coded by some Bangalore guys. I really respect and admire Chinese and Indian software scene but not the "outsource"guys. I know their way of work.
The OS and apps are all written by Americans. Google "Apple software logs out of India". Perhaps NOW the apps & OS will be written in India but I doubt it since India is unable to produce a working operating system anyone can sell. And Apple's quality standards are impossibly high for India to meet. If you want junk go with Windows, if you want something solid, go with OS X. Apple's desktop and mobile software will continue to be written in the US. The crap anyone can do like SAP and ORacle will go to India. Who cares.
Indians were ranked 2nd from last in an OECD student study - behind workers from Guatemala, Ecuador, and most countries in Africa. SECOND FROM LAST. Brainy? I don't think so. Delusional is more like it.
Companies ruined or almost ruined by imported Indian labor
Adaptec - Indian CEO Subramanian Sundaresh fired.
AIG (signed outsourcing deal in 2007 in Europe with Accenture Indian frauds, collapsed in 2009)
AirBus (Qantas plane plunged 650 feet injuring passengers when its computer system written by India disengaged the auto-pilot).
Apple - R&D CLOSED in India in 2006.
Australia's National Australia Bank (Outsourced jobs to India in 2007, nationwide ATM and account failure in late 2010).
Bell Labs (Arun Netravalli took over, closed, turned into a shopping mall)
Boeing Dreamliner ES software (written by HCL, banned by FAA)
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (Trade Secrets and documents stolen in U.S. by Indian national guest worker)
Caymas - Startup run by Indian CEO, French director of dev, Chinese tech lead. Closed after 5 years of sucking VC out of America.
Caterpillar misses earnings a mere 4 months after outsourcing to India, Inc.
Circuit City - Outsourced all IT to Indian-run IBM and went bankrupt shortly thereafter.
ComAir crew system run by 100% Indian IT workers caused the 12/25/05 U.S. airport shutdown when they used a short int instead of a long int
Computer Associates - Former CEO Sanjay Kumar, an Indian national, sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for accounting fraud.
Deloitte - 2010 - this Indian-packed consulting company is being sued under RICO fraud charges by Marin Country, California for a failed solution.
Dell - call center (closed in India)
Delta call centers (closed in India)
...
I used to work for a company which developed hardware with bespoke software, with a lot of customer involvement during the MMI development to give them exactly what they need. It is a long process, but ensures the customer is happy with what is delivered.
Senior management decided to outsource the software to India (not telling you who). They were at CMMI level 5, so our Management were only too happy for us to 'just' produce the outline spec and for them to develop it. They were at CMMI 5, what could go wrong?
Turns out that their idea of 'working with the customer to develop the software' consisted of us writing the 'outline' spec to the level of 'When this event occurs, draw a box on the screen of this size, this thickness lines with these exact radiused corners, of this colour, exactly here, with the following text, of this typeface.' They would then code it and test that 'when this event occurs check that a box is drawn on the screen of this size............etc etc'
Step forward a year. Every spec we delivered was rejected as not being 'sufficiently detailed' to start coding. In the meantime we had developed the whole system fully working and tested witht he Customer , from which we finished off the detailed specification.( yeh I know).
At this point the customer wanted to know why we were not shipping the finished product as they had seen it fully working, so we shipped the system with our development code. Apparently, apart from being late, the customer was very happy.
We spent £100Ks and never got a single line of code delivered from India. Having delivered the product, the last communication I saw from India was a rejection of our latest spec for 'not being sufficiently detailed'.
India is the land of conmen and charlatans. They are incapable of producing anything that works. It's a giant con propagated by loads of NASSCOM propaganda pumped into western media about what genisues they are. Every single company that ties this ends up throwing $ down the tandoori rathole. Every company these people touch dies in the end. EVERY ONE. India sees all the big $ western companies have in the bank and they just want to grab it. So they've created this myth that they are IT geniuses even though more software comes from Scandanavia than from India.
Google "Guest workers exposed chapter 3" to see what is really going on. Jobs is rolling over in his grave right now. The globalists have gotten control of Apple.
whose?
These companies are sufficiently large that they can (and often do) up sticks to where the tax situation is most favorable.
I think you will find that many of 'our' corporations are Irish, or based in Luxemburg, or do business out of grand cayman etc...
Ultimately, any increase in tax will be passed on to the consumer.
The jobs are in India. Why should Indian workers pay income taxes to the US Treasury instead of their own government?
It wasn't that long ago that the US (and the UK in its turn) was the sweatshop of the world. Now it's some other country's turn and you're complaining?
If the US wants more tax revenues, they could try taxing those high earners who pay less tax than their cleaners. Even Warren Buffet has suggested this and he's one of the wealthiest people on the planet, so it's not as if there's a complete lack of will.
Indian programmers are only trying to compete by pushing a major asset: their low wages. (It's not as bad as it seems either: a low-wage nation usually has a low cost of living too. I live in Italy for similar reasons.)
Actions have consequences. Voting is an action. Globalisation is a consequence of past elections. Outsourcing is a consequence of globalisation. You voted for all this. If you don't like it, perhaps you might want to (cough!) "Vote Different" next time.
The problem that you see as an effective tax rate is a myth.
In the US, you have two tax rates. One for income earned in the year, and one for capital gains on investments that have been held for longer than a year.
So you take someone who is very rich. They earn $$$ from investments, and $ from annual salary. The bulk of their income is taxed at a much lower rate so if you look at their average tax rate, its much lower. Then you also have some losses that get added to the mix.
But here's why its a myth...
That capital gains rate is also the same for guys like you and me. The idea is to reward people for long term holdings and investments.
The difference is that I earn $ from investments and $$$ from salary. (Relatively speaking.)
So I end up paying a higher average tax rate than W. Buffet. However he still ends up paying more than I do in taxes.
The real problem is a lack of patriotism, and I would guess that is due to the elimination of the draft. You couldn't pay a draftee from WWII enough money to have Japan or Germany make anything for a company they owned. They literally had blood and tears invested in their own country, today's CEOs have felt none of that, they don't see a reason in why they can't save some dollars by sending jobs to other countries, to them, the profits all spend the same. They never had to fight for their opportunity to make money, so like all spoiled children, they don't appreciate what they have and who they should appreciate. Plus, it's not like the CEOs live in the same neighborhood as their employees anymore, so firing 5,000 people really doesn't mean much, it kind of like a game to them, they have separated themselves from seeing the consequences their actions, they don't see the boarded up windows of their ex-employees homes, or the town devastated. That is what happens when you give yourself a salary 4000 times that of the standard employee, instead of the 4 to 40 times that it used to be before to 80's.
To sum up, outsourcing=greed, plain and simple.
That is exactly what the bankers DON'T want. We had a huge boom and tax SURPLUS in the late 90s and that meant no more need for the bankers or for borrowing. The bankers who control the governments of the world won't stand for surpluses. The #1 way they know they can reduce tax revenues is to send work offshore - and offshore to countries that will destroy the businesses through incompetence. The bankers are waging a war on success and personal wealth. The only way they can keep us in debt is to keep the productive people out of the economy. That is what this is really all about.
> I have yet to have it go well a single time.
Hmmm. I was hoping my experience was atypical...
I wrote a H.263 video codec for a processor developed by my then-employer. I was about to start coding the rest of the H.324 stack when my management put me in touch with a group in India. They told me they had substantially all of the bits I didn't, and could they please have access to my codec and one of my colleague's modem work?
This all sounded fine, and we agreed to work together. Within 48 hours of that agreement - I kid you not - the manager of this Indian team had made a formal complaint against my colleague and me because we hadn't sent every single thing we'd ever done to them.
I ended up writing the H.324 stack myself - it turned out that the Indian group didn't have what they had promised. They were simply lying to get access to my codec. I never did understand that - they were part of the same company, and they could have had it for the asking.
I've also worked with Indian groups in the US - and they were all excellent. But my experience with a group in India tallies worryingly well with the stereotype.
Vic.
I was doing some work for a client.
We wrote our own unit tests where we had both positive assertions and negative assertions.
(unit tests that not only tested results when correct data was presented, but also when incorrect data was present so we could show that the code failed cleanly )
We then sent the code off to an Indian contract shop for Acceptance testing.
In one set of cases, I would get e-mails from the testing group asking them for me to write a formal test plan for them.
In another I would get my code rejected. Why? because they wanted to test if the data coming from the database was incorrect. This test wasn't valid since we control the data in the database and it wouldn't be wrong. We then had to spend many hours explaining to them the difference between pessimistic code and optimistic code.
Roll forward a month. Same scenario, different tester.
I'm going to assume that everyone here knows what is meant by pessimistic coding and that it performs like shit.
> I'm going to assume that everyone here knows what is meant by pessimistic coding
It's also called "defensive coding".
> and that it performs like shit.
Take a look at Ariane 501[1] for an object lesson in why there's more to programming than simple performance...
Vic.
[1] There are many alternative examples, but that one was very visual in its outcome.
Anon coz I'm working on a project that Wipro threw away in their own backyard.
They can't even deliver stuff in India.
And if the team of mostly useless developers they shipped in at a previous employer is anything to go by then all those devs in India will be producing really top notch software - Not!
They do have some bright devs who can actually think for themselves but these are a very small minority.
I've seen the results of "cheap" development ... some of these clowns, even if they were working for free it would be overpriced.
Where should I start ... the VB code that defined a constant named PI ... with a value of 3.27? The help file ... With Every Single Word In Capital Letters? As required, the binary was supplied complete wtth the (undocumented!) VB source ... in a zip file ... with a password nobody was told. Just as well those passwords were fairly easy to crack even in those days (c 1996/97). Oh, and the calculations that application was created to perform took a long time ... with a progress bar slowly crawling across the screen ... yes, 99+% of the CPU time was going on the progress bar; disable it, the actual calculation was complete in a small fraction of a second, so no progress bar needed anyway.
It's just far too tempting for short-sighted managers to grab the lower price tag without understanding the much higher costs down the road. I've had this with customer support, too. Three have a third world third rate sweatshop to botch customer calls on the cheap (and boy did they botch mine, putting me on completely the wrong tariff and refusing to correct it when I pointed that out, during the same call: 'too late' to fix - so Retentions, the UK team, had to fix it instead, and give me a discount to keep me. O2 invested in putting the relevant form online instead, so I could do it myself properly without learning Urdu. (Which my mother actually speaks, but I'm not going to get her to translate!)
I keep hoping eventually companies this dumb/myopic/greedy will fail because of it, but I don't see any sign of Sanjay going on the dole just yet. Maybe the increasing numbers cold-calling "I am from IT, please give me control of your PC so I can take your money" is a sign the regular call-centre work's drying up, though...
So these guys were responsible for 10.5.0 rushed disaster which leaks RAM and cpu when aqua progress bar appears doesn't eject/ turnoff usb disks while shutting down, has half the opengl performance on same hardware compared to 10.4.11
All of above were reported to Apple using official channels, fix promised and never arrived until end of life.
It is amazing that this particular outsourcing scandal (yes, check their margin) is used to bad mouth China. Ask android users about quality of Chinese developed software, eg. Go Suite. Yes, their English may suck but code/ care doesn't.
No, none of Apple's software was made in India. It's all made in USA. Read the article - this is about SAP and backoffice work going to India, not customer facing products. Apple CLOSED their R&D in India in 2006. Jobs hated India after seeing how poor it was and vowed never to send Apple software work there. 100% of Apple's consumer software is made in Cupertino. That may change now that Cook The Globalist is in charge, but as for the past, nope none of it was made offshore.
My former employer spend hundreds of millions on setting up a brilliant off shoring Center in Singapore it really was offshoring done right. . 5-6 years after they set it up - its working well and the current Assclown of a CIO who thinks the only measure of an organisations capability is whether it has CMMI level 5 decides to close the whole thing down and take up with Wipro in India. Cue massive knowledge
loss, slower (no) delivery and and costs exactly the same. Wipro are a complete shower of c*nts.
The best ever software developer I have known is Indian - fortunately he is in the US currently getting a green card. Good developers in India are few and and far between these days - and shysters like Wipro can't afford any that are left.
Exactly the same experience here, newly-built replacement expanded office for longstanding company branch in cheapy EU-location gets shut down, work moved to you-know-where.
Outsourcer bought but oddly doesn't have experience in the product sector, or a suitable building (needs new one built more expensively than the EU one) developers strangely have only a couple of years of C# and Java experience but not the required lots of C++ etc.
Outsourcer developers need more cash to retain than experienced cheapy-EU ones, regardless of experience, or they simply walk to another deal in the next city block ....
HQ eventually fires and demotes the people involved in pushing the work to outsourcer, and emergency-hires the soon-to-be offloaded most experienced cheapy-EU dudes to US HQ at new US rates, after US product team managers start screaming blue murder ....
Luvvly-jubbly. Cheers!
;)
AC well you know why
Is this a congregation of sore whiners and losers - "I know someone who outsourced something and result was bad. Bad Bangalore. Bad India. UK is the best" .
Simples- It shows the quality of the those who outsource. And if they are of piss poor quality, I can only say that the ecosystem that produces them is basically untenable.
UK quality is not something marketable unlike "Made in Germany" branding. India knows this too well from Westland helicopters saga!
If you had actually bothered to read the comments you would have seen its to do with the general quality of the big India outsourcing shops - not Indians in general.
Now most people with any experience of them would agree that's self evident - only those currently work for them would disagree IMHO.
And here are today's keywords:-
Satyam, WiPro, MegaSoft, World Bank, Blacklist, Improper Benefits, Body-Swaps, Account Audit Fraud, Big 4, India's Enron, Risk
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/world-bank-bans-wipro-megasoft-satyam/409724/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/business/worldbusiness/08satyam.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479545,00.html
Smaller ones IMHO no better, try to target vulnerable individuals in client company ... vulnerable as in "likes stuffed brown envelopes" and "doesn''t give a damn about the company's products, future or share value". Also, beware outsourcer shareholder/founders miraculously turning up at client HQ as mystery random anonymous "programmers" on nice day rates. They must be awfully bored in their own office.
Just speaking good English isn't enough of a reason to give out tech work. There are other factors. Time zone is one ..... for teamwork.
AC as I know more than I should do at my tender age about this kind of horribility ;)
P.S.
I could mention basic assumptions for us naive western customers like primary public sanitation, heathcare, education and infrastructure, and point out that inside pictures of Bangalore's rail station look eerily similar to 1950s UK structures and equipment, almost as if no-one had spent any money since then, but that would be just mean, right? ;)
Fact. Outsourcing has grown. Not shrunk.
Fact. Companies in India/Vietnam are competitive.
Fact. Germany does far less outsourcing that UK.
The issue here is that the UK is not conducive for software development / maintenance.
Employees turning up with a hangover, inappropriate jokes, a sense of know-all and none working after 2PM fridays . Add to that poor punctuality.They simply cannot handle large projects. Far too expensive.
80% of the work is a level playing field whether UK or INdia. 20% makes the software and the difference. YOu can hire anyone from anywhere for the 20% , develop the rest in INdia and be profitable.
What value does UK add. Nothing. Zero.
HIgh on rhetoric , low on business sense ( actually any sense) from the posters here. Must be the also-rans
So why is it then that I use zero indian software, but have used more than one piece of British software and hardware ? PuTTY, ARM processors and Symbian come to mind.
Maybe you can do some s**ty corporate software in India, but whenever it must be of high quality and of a proper concept, India is the worst choice.
The rigour and quality of european education still produces some results, I guess. Even tiny Norway does more in terms of high-quality software than the 1000+ million indians. Think of MySQL.
Are you comparing development of Putty/MySQL with enterprise applications for companies and saying they are the same? Do you understand business at all and what outsourcing is and what is being outsourced.
By your same argument, does it mean that because UK does not have a space launch vehicle, no space-based industry meets quality standards there?
Back to suckling for you then.
Hangover, bad jokes, early finish on Friday - cool. I think if you look around you'll see plenty of good software development happening in the uk? And I'm not talking about trying to make a File/Open dialog box work properly either but that's probably just me
The sort of people who work at the sort of places that sell their services for the sort of prices that tempt western companies to engage them aren't the sort of people you want working for you.
Anybody that thinks this is to do with the fact that it's India or Indians is just plain racist, if you paid a UK company the rates that these people ask for you'd get roughly the same service! From what I've been told by an Indian colleague, these places usually don't even pay their people during their 3 months probationary period. High fliers don't tend to put up with that kind of thing.
Hej,
I would agree to some of the comments posted . India does produce 400,000 engineers and most of them work as software programmer.
The quality of the engineers are really bad. But I would say that there are 50 decent university in India and we have 25000 good programmers coming out every year.
Most of the outsourced project to India is testing software's which is more like high school work.
I worked in a multi national company in India, as new fresh graduate. I was assigned the second engineer for developing a kernel extension;apparently my senior was not good,I ended up doing the entire work on my own :) I also had to do lots of work to cover up other senior employees who were in sibling team . But what finally mattered was that,we delivered it. I was little sad about promotion,salary hike which happened democratically(equal hike to everyone and equal promotion to everyone).
But practically, for my development job all I needed to work was 2-4hours which could keep me @pace with my project plans. So I used the other time to assist my seniors,carry out sessions of knowledge transfer. I was very happy after leaving the company. I finally came to States for higher study.
The Multinational companies like Mircrosoft,Facebook,Google,Yahoo,Intel are still able to do quality job in India.
Google has about 5000 sw programmers in India and they aren't a dumb company in today context.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
