7. July 2008 by Martin Suter.

A line from a poem, “The New Colossus”, by the nineteenth-century American poet Emma Lazarus, appears on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. It ends with Liberty herself speaking:

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

While this may have sufficed as American immigration policy pre-WWI, when a strong back and a desire to work was all that was necessary to build out the nation’s infrastructure, it doesn’t cut it today. And yet, in many ways, these sentiments continue to be reflected by US immigration policy in the 21^st century.

America is slipping by most meaningful, objective measures: Education, healthcare, productivity, GDP per capita, trade deficits, etc. I was at a private lecture, a couple of years ago, at which Gene Kranz (“Failure is Not An Option”) was the guest speaker. He decried the situation in fairly stark terms by saying that there will not be enough US aerospace engineering graduates to backfill the positions vacated by retiring NASA engineers. How are we going to beat the Chinese to the moon or continue to push the boundaries of exploration with a manned mission to Mars if we can’t fully staff NASA?

The US has many different visa classes. The H1B is an employer-sponsored visa specifically for those positions that require advanced degrees. However, the number of H1Bs available each year is a fraction of the demand, meaning that one’s chances of getting a visa are reduced to a lottery. Companies like Google and Microsoft have been vocal in their view that their ability to fully staff in the US is negatively impacted by the inadequate quota levels of available H1B visas and have gone so far as to open substantial R&D offices in Vancouver, as well as in places like India, China & Russia.

While getting an H1B is a milestone for many professionals, it is limited in terms of time (3 year term, 6 years max), and does not allow for spouses or children to work in the US. Nor is it a path to US citizenship – that path is through a Green Card.

There are essentially two ways to get a coveted Green Card – sponsorship by a family member already resident in the US, or sponsorship by an employer. The family sponsored applicants need not have any advanced skills or education – only a desire to reside in the US and a family member capable of sponsoring them. And while we cling to the belief that it is possible to live the American Dream, the reality is that many of these Green Card holders have neither the education nor the skills necessary to help America improve its competitiveness in a frictionless, flat world.

I speak from personal experience when I say that the path to Green Card for educated professionals is not trivial. Many potential Green Card applicants may also be H1B visa holders, at least the lucky few to have gotten one. The perception continues to be propagated that a Green Card applicant can’t be in the country to fill a position that an American is capable of doing. The first step is for the employer to demonstrate to the Department of Labor that no American meets the minimum qualifications laid out for that position. Not that they are more qualified than the prospective immigrant, simply that they meet the minimum qualifications. This is a very low bar to set and as a result, many highly qualified non-US citizens that want to live, raise their families and pay taxes in the US are not able to do so.

The sad fact is that these jobs are being created elsewhere, as the production of “bits” has very different location requirements than does the production of “atoms”. American leadership in technology and its competitive advantage are evaporating, and what’s unfortunate is that many of the people that could help stop this slide, have been lined up at the door, asking politely to get in.  However, too many are turned away and prevented from doing so.

Immigration needs to be managed, but the pool of potential immigrants is a tremendous resource to be tapped. An enlightened immigration policy would be aligned with a clearly defined set of national priorities. Want to improve competitiveness and GDP? Make it easier for educated professionals to live and work in the country. Let their spouses, many of which are also highly educated, work and contribute as well. And most importantly, so doing will allow their children to be educated, work and stay in the US as well. Professionals are net producers and help to grow the national economy and the tax base not takers.

So continue to let in the tired, poor and huddled masses, but make it easier for those of us that are neither tired, nor poor, but who desire to be productive members of the US economy to stay in the country for more than six years.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net

Posted in Immigration, Education, Microsoft, Google | Print | 1 Comment »

25. February 2008 by Martin Suter.

Last summer, at contract renewal time, I migrated from a Blackberry to a Windows Mobile Smart Phone (AT&T 8525 made by HTC). It had gotten good reviews, and I liked the slide out QWERTY keypad, so I took the plunge.

Besides the dismal battery life, the move has been mostly a bust, and today I’m dusting off my "old" Blackberry and taking a step forward by taking a step backwards.

"Why?", you might ask…

To make a long story short, complexity.

Short on device memory, I have spent (literally) hours on-line trying to figure out how to free up memory. I want to move a single file (PIM.vol) from my local memory to the SD card, and to then have the sync engine sync with it in its new location…Did I say that I’ve spent hours trying to find out how to do this?

The "solution" is to download a 3rd-party Registry Editor, and to then find and change several registry entries, re-boot a couple of times and then cross your fingers. Now I consider myself to be fairly technical, but why is this my problem? Why should I be mucking around in low-level registry entries to hack a fix when I should be able to open up Windows Explorer and drag the PIM.vol file from one place to another and then have the applications figure it out.

I’m not the only guy with this issue. I came across hundreds of entries from people with the same problem. How many of them will still be Windows Mobile device customers or Google Mobile customers is anybody’s guess, but I’m betting that people won’t have to hack their registry with a Google device.

Smart is not designing something that only engineers can figure out, smart is designing something that everyone can figure out.

C’mon Microsoft, you can do better…No, you NEED to do better. What’s the old maxim about it costing 10X to get a new customer than to keep existing ones? If you lose/alienate your early adopters, it will be very difficult, and maybe impossible, to gain back this market share.

That’s my .02!

Martin

(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Posted in Blackberry, Microsoft, Google | Print | No Comments »

21. February 2008 by Martin Suter.

Earlier this morning, Microsoft brought out all the big guns to make a major announcement around, what it called, "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". Its 3 guiding interoperability principles are:

• Open connections
• Standards support
• Data portability

Now I’ve often felt that Microsoft has never been given (nor taken) enough credit for its interoperability efforts and its support for standards. With its entree into the enterprise in the late 90’s, Microsoft acknowledged implicitly and explicitly that IT is, by its very nature, heterogeneous. Active Directory uses LDAP and Kerberos. Office 2007 has moved to XML as a standard file format. Even in consumer applications like Windows Media Player, where Microsoft supports its own proprietary media formats, it does an equally good job of playing .mp3 or .avi files as well.

Notwithstanding all that, today’s announcement is an important one, if only to further assuage the EU and the Open Source community that Microsoft continues to increase its transparency.

As I spent time digesting this announcement on Microsoft.com, I came across a free download - Windows Live Writer, a very cool, free, blogging application that allows me to do WYSIWYG blog authouring and save it offline. No more creating Word docs on planes and then cutting and pasting to the web. What’s even more impressive, is that it seamlessly integrates with WordPress, my Linux-based hosted blog. The set-up process scanned my site, uploaded all the relevant formatting and gives me a far richer, more flexible authouring platform. It has optional Plug-Ins, which are downloadable from the Windows Live site. To date, there are 80 3rd-party plug-ins, including plug-ins for Firefox, RealPlayer, Flickr, Picassa and even Google functionality.

So just to get this straight, I can create an XML blog article on my Windows laptop, insert Google capabilities (if I so chose), save it to NTFS locally and publish it to a Linux server. Who knew?!?

Interoperability in action. It rocks.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter
(martin.suter@iplicensing.net)

Posted in Microsoft, Google, Linux | Print | No Comments »

22. January 2008 by Martin Suter.

The biggest problem that I have with the open source ecosystem is that it obfuscates its commercial motives behind this banner of altruism. The attempted distinction between commercial vs. open-source, with the implication that open source is somehow not commercial, is a red herring.

Open-source is also commercial. Look at the companies behind Linux - IBM, Google, Oracle, Sun, Novell, Red Hat. Does anyone really believe their support of Linux is altruistic or that they’re motivated by the distribution of “free” software? If profit is not their motive, someone better tell their shareholders!

In the mid-80’s, the Canadian government reduced the patent protection afforded to pharmaceutical companies from 20 years to 10. From this, tremendous wealth was created for the owners of two generic drug manufacturers, Apotex and Novopharm. Were these companies acting out of the interest of the general population or were they parasitic offspring from a flawed premise? Each of these companies chose to remain private, and therefore able to keep their financial records away from public scrutiny, while the “commercial” pharmaceutical companies opened their books to the market, and to criticism. The owners of the generics became billionaires, not because they were running charities, but because they were able to monetize others’ IP and risk capital.

Sure, Big Pharma is profitable, but it is not at the expense of society. Rather, it is frequently to the benefit of society. Look at how the invention of H2 receptor antagonists changed the treatment of ulcers and reflux esophagitis. Twenty five years ago, ulcers often required surgical intervention, but Tagamet changed the rules of the game. Did the profit that SKF made come at the expense of society or did the invention of a disruptive technology (if you were a GI surgeon!) warrant these profits?

Under what terms does Google license Linux? How much does it “give back”? I’m suggesting that it is highly selective as to what it “gives back” to the open source community, and makes these decisions based on its own self-interest, not out of some altruistic motive. Google search algorithms are deeply guarded secrets, and its vaunted server farm architecture is “proprietary”. Is there anything wrong with this? Of course not. Just don’t pretend that you’re somehow better than the “commercial” vendors because you promote open source development opportunistically.

“This is what [Summer of Code] is really about: infecting students with the free software spirit, giving them the opportunity to grow into a community like ours.”

There’s another more subtle benefit, as DiBona explains. Thanks to the Summer of Code, “Google now knows all the people working on all these software projects, on which it depends,” he says. “That’s incredibly useful to us. Every once in a while we’ll come out with a new API and there’ll be some projects in the open source world that might be useful in either using that API or being a customer. You can just call them up and say, ‘hey guys, it’s Google, we’re you’re pal,’ and let them just check it out.” (http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=2395)

I have never heard, nor do I ever expect to hear, any allusions from Microsoft that it is anything but a profit-driven, commercial software vendor. As a shareholder, I expect nothing less.That’s my .02!

Martin

Posted in Microsoft, Google, Linux, IP | Print | 2 Comments »