Sun reseller’s ‘neck in the noose’

Sun Wrong Team? HP & Dell Right team?

> a "Sun-only reseller" in Boulder, CO. since
> 1989. Here's what he had to say:
>
> "I feel for those people at Sun since many
> have contacted us about other job
> opportunities; they are bright, well-educated
> and hard-working. The only thing they ever
> did wrong was maybe pick the wrong team and
> not go to HP or Dell.

That guy has to be kidding. HP's presence north of Boulder in Fort Collins, Colorado has withered to almost nothing, and Dell's in Colorado Springs is a mere shadow of it's former self. Both have outsourced nearly everything to Asia, leaving no real
jobs in Colorado except a very few various non-technical so-called "manager" (ie like the informant's "acct manager" position - read non-technical or semi-technical sales geek) positions that pay 1/2 to 2/3 of a senior engineer position - if you can get one.

With IBM laying off and sending 5000 jobs to India, what's left besides McDonalds and Walmart?

We saw this before in Colorado in the 90's, when massive technical layoffs meant honest-to-god Rocket Scientists and Aerospace engineers from Lockheed, Martin Marietta, etc were laid off. I personally know many who took over 50% pay cuts to become bank tellers, over 65% pay cuts to become King Soopers Checkout Clerks because that's all they could get!

Many others gutted their 401k's to "buy into" little franchises like 7-11, Pizza Hut and PostNet. I expect to see more of that real soon. For those guys and gals their only hope is to not ever get sick and their retirement future is to "work until they drop".

This Strange New World of the 21st century is looking even worse. It appears there will be nothing left but low paying service jobs, and people selling Chinese made rocks to each other

And I am sick of the "optimists" saying you need to re-invent yourself, "you need to be retrained for better jobs"! How many tens of thousands of laid off folks went back to school to get various degrees only to find that the very jobs they were attempting to train for Just Got Outsourced to Asia?

And pray tell how do technical engineers "re-invent" themselves into sales geeks? Go look into Briggs-Meyers Personality tests and you will see that marketing/sales (gee, like Don) and true technical engineers live
and think in different worlds that rarely meet.

For a better understanding of the situation I submit that Life Imitates Art - go watch the old "West Wing" episode #107: Talking Points in which Bartlet is on his way to Europe to sign a new treaty giving more international copyright protections, but plans get complicated because of news that about 17,000 computer jobs are moving to India, jobs that laid-off workers were literally trained for.

for the real world, see the report:
According to a much-cited November 2002 report by the research firm Forrester, the number of US jobs "offshored" is predicted to increase from 400,000 jobs to 3.3 million jobs by 2015, with two-thirds of the loss being from what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as office and administrative positions as well as computer and mathematical occupations.

clearly the outsourcing has accelerated much faster than predicted, and is enhanced by the fact that not only are wages as little as 1/10 that of US employees, Corporations are taxed at a significantly lower rate (if at all) on outsourced work.

sun reseller

post Sun acquisition, as and when it happens, Sun resellers will have to outperform IBM reseller as the product strategy will not be clear. As the dust settles, Sun resellers will have to align. I don't think that the Sun resellers specially the die-hard ones, have smooth road ahead. Sun being a pure tech company, has been weak on sales & marketing front. IBM's depth of experience in this area will definitely help but that is once the product strategy is decided. The big question is will IBM continue the Sparc family? What happens to the CMT's now that Linux has been ported for CMT's.
Interestingly we are back to the 1970's time frame. Few hardware vendors.