labor arbitrage Archive

Over the last few weeks, we saw “bad news” about massive layoffs at IBM (100,000) and TCS (25,000), two of the industry’s largest services companies and market leaders. Those numbers proved to be overstated, but clarification on the real numbers isn’t what’s important. The numbers distract from the real issue. Attention-grabbing news headlines and

It’s the season when analyst/advisory firms flood the media their predictions and top-10 lists. One problem with those lists is the services world rarely has 10 things that are different from the year before. Another problem is we tend to hype new technologies and business models and make predictions about their impact in the

Much like Jonathan Swift proposed an outrageous, over-the-top suggestion that the Irish eat their children as a way to accommodate themselves in famine and over-population, I have a modest proposal for Infosys. It’s over the top, but it’s intended to highlight an issue. My modest proposal is that Infosys keep its platform IP business,

Infosys made headlines recently, announcing the separation of its products, platforms and solutions (PPS) business into a subsidiary called Edgeverve Systems. It’s a bold move, but in many respects it makes sense. Here’s my take on the implications and potential net result of the spinout strategy. As I explained in an article in The

There is an inconvenient truth in the global services industry: The growth rates in labor-arbitrage-based businesses are diminishing. Tied to that fact is an even more inconvenient truth: Service providers have overreached in moving to outcome-based platform models to compensate for the drop in arbitrage growth rates. Labor arbitrage is not going away. But