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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Time to learn Hindi or Mandarin?
As the U.S. economy finally shrugged off its recession, and even technology stock prices started to perk up, laid-off American computer programmers began to wonder if the jobs they'd lost during the bust were ever coming back. Two U.C. Berkeley researchers calculated that some 14 million white-collar office jobs in the United States are "vulnerable" to offshoring, outsourcing and near-shoring. This year, the outsourcing phenomenon moved well beyond the practice of multinational corporations body-shopping their customer-service call centers out to the lowest bidder. Today, cutting-edge technology start-ups are getting into the act as well, looking to find talent for a fraction of the cost in countries like India and China.
And while some U.S. geeks are counseling their techie brethren to unionize now, before it's too late, technology managers and venture capitalists are defending the practice as good for companies, the U.S. economy, the global economy, consumers and the world. Besides, they argue, it's inevitable. Time to upgrade your skills!
Hollwood's copyright craziness, and iTunes to the rescue
For years, the music industry has been threatening to sue individuals who trade copyrighted music over online peer-to-peer services, but it was still a stunning development, this summer, when the music cops finally made good on their threat. Early in the year, two legal developments set the stage for the individual suits -- one federal judge prohibited the industry from suing trading services for the copyright violations of their users, and another judge forced ISPs to turn over the identities of individuals suspected of using P2P programs. So in September, the Recording Industry Association of America, the main music business trade group, sued 261 people -- a group that included grandparents and school kids, all potentially liable for millions (or hundreds of millions) in damages. Since then, the RIAA has sued hundreds more. (The group also announced an "amnesty program" to grant a reprieve to traders who pledge never to go near a P2P network again. It's hard to find anyone who'll agree to RIAA's terms, though.)
Have the lawsuits slowed the illegal music trade? The expert consensus is that they seem to have had only a minimal effect: Trading volume has decreased slightly, if at all, and the most hardened file-traders easily figured out ways to avoid detection by the RIAA. The industry, though, is convinced that the lawsuits have contributed to a recent uptick in CD sales.
But if, in the long run, 2003 is seen as a turning point in the music business -- a year that marked the decline of illegal trading and the emergence of legal online music distribution -- the shift will probably be thanks to a man named Steve Jobs rather than the RIAA's lawsuits. In April, Jobs, the visionary CEO of Apple, unveiled his iTunes Music Store, which did away with the Byzantine subscription music plans the industry had previously touted, in favor of a practical, common-sense approach to selling music online: The customer gets to do what she wants with the songs she buys. (At first the store was available just for Macs; it's now on Windows, too.)
iTunes has been a phenomenal success for Apple. It's already sold 25 million songs through the service, and the company expects to sell 100 million tracks by April. There now seems to be no question that Apple's service -- or one of the many similar rival services, such as the new Napster -- will become one of the main ways people get their music in the decades to come. "Our position, from the beginning, was that 80 percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves," Jobs told Rolling Stone magazine in December. "But that it is such a compelling way to get music: It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it ... We said: We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot -- not just a stick. And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience ... and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song."
Genes Inc.
Fears that tinkering with our genes may make our descendents better looking and smarter, but less human were a bit overshadowed this year by all the happy hoopla around the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. In some ways, however, that strange-new-world future of the enhanced human race has already arrived. In some countries, such as Estonia, the marketing of genetic information has already become a reality -- and even a source of nationalistic pride.
A backlash continues to brew in the area of genetically modified crops, of which the United States has historically been more accepting than Europeans. But those hopes that you could bring a dead pet back from the grave by cloning it, sometime in the not too distant future, looked somewhat more illusory, after a litter of cloned pigs at Texas A&M turned out to have very different personalities.
