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Going global local? What goes around comes around..
Sun, 26 Jun 2005

This entry is being written while sitting in a doctor's waiting room at 8am or so (for something normal don't worry :) -- written on my phone via ssh to a server. Cute, but it does crimp the style :)

I remember maybe 10 years ago I used to go out of my way to seek out local (Canadian or North American) goods, being careful to read package details and remembering which companies were Canadian etc. Nowadays I'm sure we're all the same, looking for our local flag or logo somewhere on the package but not really thinking much about it, since globalization has been around for many decades and we've become accustomed to Made in Taiwan being the mark of a good price. And why worry -- when globalization ran sidelong into the manufacturing industry, we survived, right? So with two identical products on the shelf we'll take one over the other if we notice a logo.. maybe.

Aside: I wonder if Google and other search engines are making people lazy; or perhaps people have always been lazy but I'm just noticing it now? :) A lot of people will email you and ask for help long before they read a FAQ or try mucking around on their own. Its 'easy' for them to make a request or look something up in google, but once they have to look at a website with their own eyeballs and they realize it'll take more than 5 seconds... out flies an email to the first address they see. Little does it worry them about the fact it costs someone 'else' that much more time.. after all, someone elses time is free right?

Aside-aside: Oh, I love ribs now. Measuring a restaurant is as easy as fetching its club sammich, and fajitas always make me smile.. but I've just discovered slow cooked tangy bbq'd ribs.. oh my _gawd_. Canada Day is next weekend and I see here this sign for something called the Ribfest - joy of joys!

Sure, I always prefer to buy 'local', but with products being made overseas we've had a lot of benefits.. reduced costs across the board. Heck, bookstores in the local malls tend to stink, so I've been using Indigo/Chapters-online to order books and with free shipping, why not? We're slowly moving to that 'enlightened' age where we can order everything from home or work and not have to see our neighbours ever again it seems, but you can't argue with books showing up next-business-day...

On the other hand, we all know the auto-industry is struggling with overseas companies cutting enormously into their profits, but its never concerned 'us' has it? Well, I'm from an auto-town and it never bothered me much, but the folks in that city are always a little scared when strike time comes and the company threatens to pull out. How long until they do? Course, I'm sure the competition has been healthy and caused all the organizations to improve efficiency and quality..

Being in IT, all the out-sourcing of the last few years has been a big concern and actually does factor into life plans. Do you take on a giant mortgage, or a small conservative one since you don't know what the state of IT will be like in 5 or 10 years? The time of deep-code and North American technological superiority is leaving us and perhaps the need for people who get the job done is going to dry up? ... eep! I noticed the other day that IBM has announced (to great stock boosting) the hire of some 13000 IT folks in Indian and Asian areas, which makes sense with their lower wage requirements and high quality of education. But I also remember when IBM announced layoffs a few months ago all over the place, excepting those same areas... makes you go hmmm..

This is another one of those posts that I figured could be a short 3 sentence quickie but I ended up meandering on, but heres all I wanted to say -- I popped by a local Chapters a few times to pick up a CD (I know - they're a bookstore chain if anything at all, but they do have some CDs and sometimes near release date even, but not like a real CD store. But Chapters is a few minutes walk away..) but they just never have the album in stock. These days I usually buy and rip straight-to-mp3 and sometimes buy online. When I buy online I don't want any DRM silliness since I don't want some foolish short sighted company controlling what I do with my legal purchases and preventing me from using my mp3 player of choice - so in recent history I've passed on Apple's iTunes Store and other similar offerings and have headed over to AllOfMp3.com, some Russian site. From what it sounds like, most .ru sites are scams but so far this site has been legit and I've not seen my credit card get raped, and with thousands of other people across the globe enjoying the service - why not? Buy an album for a couple bucks and get a high quality rip of the music in whatever unencumbered audio file format you like. Cool, and even legit (to some extent?) since the .ru music and government organizations tried to shut them down and found them legal (at the time?)

So there we go, I bowed to conveniance since life is always so busy and have bought music online, to get it the way I've wanted it. Local (okay, across the net but still local-ish) guys just couldn't or wouldn't deliver the way I'd like...) -- but I feal a little guilty.

Guilty? Yep -- thats a sort of outsourcing -- buying the product from somewhere else. If everyone does it, we end up closing another more local shop and putting our funds into another countries hands. Is that a problem? I know a few unemployed software developers and when their companies paid over seas, it sure bugged them...

So think longer term and pay the higher buck for the same or worse?

Course, international borders should be blurring and folks in other countries should be buying just as much or more from us as we are from them, in which case all is cool and everyone in the world smiles. In the IT field, we're not likely to be so lucky, but who knows about the other fields..

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