Here are some comments from Forbes readers on my last column. My response is below. Please feel free to chime in.
I am frustrated with Obama for not addressing the questions about what he plans to do to turn around the economy. I am also frustrated with his anti-business, anti-globalization, and anti-free-trade rhetoric. It has led me to ponder the question, what should US economic policy focus on to get some vitality back into the system?
One of my readers asked me for comments on the outlook for the global economy. I saw this post on Paul Kedrosky’s site which I think does a very good job summarizing the situation, which effectively, is demand exceeding supply in every dimension. [It’s actually a passage from FT].
Did you know, China now offshores manufacturing to Vietnam? If Pakistan behaved itself, may be India would start offshoring some call-centers over! In 2008, outsourcing, offshoring and globalization are likely to continue as major trends. Rising wages in the most popular offshore centers (especially Bangalore), are eroding the cost advantage that drove this business to
SM: What is your philosophy of recruiting leadership? Is it domain expertise, leadership skills, both? BH: Yes, yes and yes! It is all of those things. It is a cultural fit. It is an excitement. There are not many maintenance jobs given the speed that we are growing at. We are looking for people with
SM: What happened after 9/11? I remember, I bought the Polycom stock and it did very well for me. BH: We were ramping very, very fast through 1999 and 2000. Cumulative average growth rates in the 30’s and 40’s. After 9/11 it exploded even more for us, but for really horrible reasons. Then the financial
SM: Listening to what you have said so far, you are going after businesses or segments which have a multi-channel dynamic. Not every industry has that. ZR: You are right about this, but a multi-channel is just one dimension. In areas where there are complexities of business, it can happen by multi-channel, complex pricing, globalization
I wrote about Citrix being an acquisition target for Oracle recently on the grounds of their on-demand collaboration product suite. Since then, I did a bit of digging on the numbers for the Citrix Online business. Whereas Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) is primarily an enterprise software company with: * $1.134B revenue 2006 * 60 million users