OFFICIAL NEWS
Microsoft moves U.S. jobs to India
Story Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
July 2, 2003, 5:35 PM PT
Microsoft is starting to shift U.S.-based jobs to India as it seeks to lower technical support and development costs, the company said Wednesday.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant, long seen as a growing company immune to job losses, is now considering cutbacks in the United States while increasing staff in India, which turns out tens of thousands of English-speaking software engineers each year.
"With lots of English-speaking talent, we were thinking of a better way to tap into that," said S. Somasegar, Microsoft's vice president of Windows engineering services.
Boosting employee ranks in India became a priority for Microsoft after its Chairman Bill Gates announced, during a visit to India in November, that the company would invest $400 million there over three years.
So far, Microsoft has about 200 engineers developing software in Hyderabad, the south India city where, five years ago, it opened its first product development center outside the United States.
Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office desktop software run on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, is recruiting people for a customer support center being launched in Bangalore as part of a pilot program.
Initially, Microsoft is hiring 150 people, but industry sources said the center could easily be scaled up to at least 1,000 people in about two years, if the pilot plan is successful.
"To meet the needs of our customers worldwide, we expect to continue to invest in a technical work force in India to assist us with our expanding product development, information technology and customer support functions," a representative of Microsoft in India said.
The software giant is betting on India's vast pool of low-cost technical workers and engineers who can be hired for roughly one-fifth what their counterparts earn in the United States.
Somasegar said Microsoft could increase the number of software developers in India to as much as 500 by 2005. However, it is still evaluating whether to expand its support staff there.
That's a key question for Microsoft employees who work in product and technical support at several U.S. locations.
Last week, Microsoft cut 161 jobs from its consulting services business. On Tuesday, unionized workers warned that Microsoft was planning to cut at least 800 employees from a facility in Texas.
The software company, which is also advertising aggressively for jobs in Bangalore, did not comment on the Communications Workers of America report.
"There may be some impact to U.S. sites, but no decision has been made at this time," said Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake.
India is of strategic importance to the company as the nation's booming $9.5 billion-a-year software services export industry emerges as a key battleground in the tussle between Windows and its rival Linux operating systems.
Story Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Microsoft moves U.S. jobs to India
Story Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
July 2, 2003, 5:35 PM PT
Microsoft is starting to shift U.S.-based jobs to India as it seeks to lower technical support and development costs, the company said Wednesday.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant, long seen as a growing company immune to job losses, is now considering cutbacks in the United States while increasing staff in India, which turns out tens of thousands of English-speaking software engineers each year.
"With lots of English-speaking talent, we were thinking of a better way to tap into that," said S. Somasegar, Microsoft's vice president of Windows engineering services.
Boosting employee ranks in India became a priority for Microsoft after its Chairman Bill Gates announced, during a visit to India in November, that the company would invest $400 million there over three years.
So far, Microsoft has about 200 engineers developing software in Hyderabad, the south India city where, five years ago, it opened its first product development center outside the United States.
Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office desktop software run on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, is recruiting people for a customer support center being launched in Bangalore as part of a pilot program.
Initially, Microsoft is hiring 150 people, but industry sources said the center could easily be scaled up to at least 1,000 people in about two years, if the pilot plan is successful.
"To meet the needs of our customers worldwide, we expect to continue to invest in a technical work force in India to assist us with our expanding product development, information technology and customer support functions," a representative of Microsoft in India said.
The software giant is betting on India's vast pool of low-cost technical workers and engineers who can be hired for roughly one-fifth what their counterparts earn in the United States.
Somasegar said Microsoft could increase the number of software developers in India to as much as 500 by 2005. However, it is still evaluating whether to expand its support staff there.
That's a key question for Microsoft employees who work in product and technical support at several U.S. locations.
Last week, Microsoft cut 161 jobs from its consulting services business. On Tuesday, unionized workers warned that Microsoft was planning to cut at least 800 employees from a facility in Texas.
The software company, which is also advertising aggressively for jobs in Bangalore, did not comment on the Communications Workers of America report.
"There may be some impact to U.S. sites, but no decision has been made at this time," said Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake.
India is of strategic importance to the company as the nation's booming $9.5 billion-a-year software services export industry emerges as a key battleground in the tussle between Windows and its rival Linux operating systems.
Story Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
posted by PABlo Bley aka Paul Alan Bley at 6:38 PM
6 Comments:
Microsoft *Totally* Fails to Stand Behind Microsoft Office and Support Their Products Because of the Poor Quality of Their Contract Support; Microsoft Support is an Oxymoron*
Hidden or camouflaged among the Longhorn, TechNet, and MSDN Evangelist buzz/blogs and great initiatives in a company full of dedicated and multi-talented people at MSFT is a phenomenon that truly constitutes the dirty underbelly of Microsoft--"support" that is not Microsoft at all--but an abusive sham that is a lucrative contract held by Convergys of Ohio who boasts on their web site that they have a staff full of attorneys who are ex-staffers on the hill (in the American Congress), and that they provide world class support. This is a prime rip off of Microsoft and it's customers. Whether that means "don't mess with us" or "we get results and our calls returned inside the Beltway" I don't know or really care. The major call centers for Convergys of Ohio are in Nova Scotia and on
Newfoundland known by many in Canada as "the rock."
On their site, Convergys boasts they "take care of their customers." I'm going to outline *how* they take care of their customers with a $500 box of Office Pro or SBE. It's my understanding that Tony Soprano takes care of his customers as well. "Bada-Bing Bada-Boom" is the corporate ethos when it comes to Microsoft's customers for Convergys.
To Be Continued --
This slogan on the page below should more accurately read "Dispose of Your Customers With Convergys--How To Quintessentially Jerk Them Around and Dump Them Fast and Show Complete Disdain For Them".
Convergys reports revenues of 2.3 Billion, and can decimate the support for a $500 box of MOS 2003. Even if Convergys employees know nothing about the product, that doesn't stop them from charging full steam ahead with their unique and potent combo of arrogance and ignorance.
Take "Better Care of Your Customers" With Convergys
http://www.convergys.com/company_overview.html#better_care
This is one aspect of Microsoft where Steve Sinofsky, Jeff Raikes, Doug Burgum, Paul Flessner, Eric Rudder, Lindsay Sparks, Jodi-Ueker-Rust, Henry Vigil, SQL Server Product Manager Kirsten Ward, and a number of others are asleep at the switch.
If one goes to the Microsoft Office site and reads every possible web page associated with Outlook and BCM, they will find none of the many hoops that may be necessary to get BCM installed and up and running due to its use of the MSDE 2000. The tack taken is rather to scatter a few (and leave many out) of the tips throughout 15 KBs and construct a 'Redmond Raiders of the Lost Ark' search.
Tech Support Microsoft style has been an enormously egregious time wasting experience. I want to distinguish Microsoft from Convergys here for good reason. I was having trouble associating BCM with Outlook. I had read all KBs, and appreciated and took all the suggestions posted in the Outlook and BCM public newsgroups, here and on the web. I did everything possible to keep the MSDE 2000 data base engine "happy" with respect to user profile, services started, and file and print sharing.
To Be Continued (again)
After talking with a number of contract support people who were not Microsoft of course, but actually Convergys although they lied and claimed they were Microsoft employees, and whose offerings consistently were to go to the OL toolbar and add BCM and getting the same crashes over 100 times.
No less than 10 appointments were made during the month over a period of 4 hours for each two day tandem. My support case was "escalated" to "BCM research". No one from Convergys ever kept the appointments, or had the courtesy or common sense to call and say something got in the way of the obligation.
This was of course extremely time wasteful because you have to be at the machine ready to "work with them," and by a clear phone line. It also meant while Microsoft employees are very conscious of their own schedules, PDAs, Tablets, Laptops, "SharePoint workspace meetings", meeting requests and meeting workspaces, and Outlook calendars and schedules, they could care less about the time and obligations of anyone else. There was never an apology for these missed appointments by the glorified Microsoft phone router manager that the phone answering temps from still another company referred me to. The problem of 10 four hour periods that were scheduled and blown off was brushed aside. Imagine what might happen to you if you stand Ballmer, Raikes, Sinofsky, Burghum, Flessner or Rudder up for a scheduled meeting, let alone ten of them, and you're on their payroll.
When I called to try to find out what happened, after trying to email several managers@microsoft.com I got mails from two Canadian Convergys employees in Novascotia assuring me of escalation and prompt calls but none came, nor were any actually planned.
Finally, after calling back I was told a call would be coming. The gentleman said he had "1/2 hour," and essentially played what I now know is the "Convergys BCM toolbar game" to hit the toolbar for a BCM add-in and watch the crash. He asked me to email the error messages about 3 weeks ago, said someone would be in touch and no one was. The error messages are all in hexadecimal; you can't paste them; and you have nothing with which to decode them. I screen shot them, and I pasted the ones I could in text. I emailed these to every SP listed who had owned the case as well as the managers at Convergys who did not seem to know much about software in general, and certainly Windows as I later found out when they called error messages directed at NT Build 2600 the default XP Launch build a beta SP2 build.
I never heard from them. When I called and got a manger of call routers who claimed he was a Microsoft employee, He was over the top hostile, and said your only support option is our contractors--take it or leave it or I'll end the case and prevent you recalling. It was also clear he knew as little about Office as he did about Windows which is also the index of Convergys' level of skill.
(Continued)
I received an email the next day saying my case had been closed because I was using a Beta OS. In fact, reproduced the same errors on Windows XP default launch build, Windows XP SP1, and every current SP2 build. They had nothing to do with the build ofWindows period.
The non-technical Canadian manager who killed the case didn't seem to give me credit for having the trouble-shooting sense to uninstalling a Beta and BCM and to reinstall them which I had done weeks before the case was "escalated" or asking for help. This is an old Convergys ploy. They'll do anything they can to squirm out of support, particularly in a case like this where they know nothing about BCM.
Convergys also does Comcast support. A couple years ago just before the XP launch, they were telling people that Windows XP did not work well with Comcast's suste,. so that they could blow off support calls when
disconnections from the internet were due to problems on the line beyond the tap, and upstream line decibel readings were well outside normal limits.
I pointed out that Bill Gates bankrolled Comcast's start and this was absurd since Windows XP has a number of networking and broadband configuration enhancements compared to other OS's and Wintendo (Win 9X), and those are well discussed in the archives of TechNet, MSDN, and the XP web pages on Microsoft's site that reference networking--some written by MS MVPs.
A cracked RJ6 cable outside and several hardware problems beyond the cable tap were the problem. This was Convergys being Convergys and I might add, not being Microsoft. Convergys will do anything to weasle out of support, because with them, the emperor has no clothes and they know little about much of the software they are purported to have SPs (service professionals) for.
In other words, Microsoft who touts that they make excellent software products contracts with some of the most incompetent support on the planet.
After I pointed out the only move several Convergys tech support people including their BCM "research" team had was to click on the toolbar to try to add in BCM, and had little understanding of the use of the SQL server MSDN 2000 that had been adapted as a miniversion for BCM, or the KBs the phone routing supervisor who alleged he was a MS employee in a suburb near Redmond snarled to take it or leave it and I got an email stating the same thing.
(Contd.)
This made me wonder: If Mr. Sinofsky and Mr. Raikes were getting the same crash, would they sit at their desks and click on the toolbar for months and embrace the Microsoft phone manager's mandate to keep on keeping on?
If I were on that product group, or part of the endless number of managers for Office products, and I were Steve Sinofsky Office VP, Jeff Raikes and the rest of the Office VPs, I'd want Microsoft to stand behind a $500 Microsoft box. What I have seen has been disingenous with respect to that concept. In other words, Microsoft ain't supportin' no BCM or Office boxes for any of us no how. I have the emails and broken appointments and insistence that I keep clicking the toolbar to prove it. I also don't speak hexidecimal, and make extensive use of the Event Viewer when I can.
Microsoft needs to start supporting their products for real. I don't believe anyone at Convergys knows a great deal about BCM and wish when they post instead of the alias [MSFT] those who are Convergys would be up front and proud of their $2 plus billion dollar grossing company. Most of us aren't fooled, and most of us know a V-1 or V-2 email is from a Convergys employee or other contract employee and not a Microsoft employee. It would not so much matter if the support personnel were part of J-Lo's back stage roadies, if they knew something about the product they were supposed to support and honored appointments.
I don't believe on the user rather than enterprise or medium business level Microsoft, the Redmond company where Jeff Raikes works, supports their own products at all, and I have substantive evidence to back this up.
Convergys is the *nasty* and completely incompetent underbelly of Microsoftsupport. I would urge anyone who gets this treatment not to be satisfied with it as an end result and to take it up with the real *Microsoft,* not Convergys of Ohio. I'm hardly the lone ranger in this perception; I've seen it for years on the XP, IE, OE newsgroups on the web as well as the MS groups.I see posts for help that begin "I couldn't solve this with long waits for Microsoft support." You weren't waiting for Microsoft; you were waiting for their "support" from Convergys.
Not every secretary or small business user has a help desk or IT team with a heads up Sys/Ad or CTO attached to them. Not all of these people are Active Directory, Windows Server 2003, Group Policy, SQL/Exchange Afficianados with a million hacks for these products at their finger tips and unfortunately the vast majority of them have never heard of an MSKB and will never see one. None of them speaks hexadecimal or has the means to interpret a long scroll down hexadecimal message that is the business end of their errors and crashes when that's all that is available to them.
Most secretary and small business users have never heard of putting "eventvwr.msc" into their run boxes, and even if they had, they would still often be stuck with hexadecimal coded errors and no means to interpret them and turn them into constructive fixes.
Developers overseas? This must by why the last 2 windows updates caused a large volume of calls over about 2 weeks. Wonder why suddenly the updates are causing problems?
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