Editing on the Internet
20 May 2004, mid-afternoon
Google recently started a company blog. They recently posted an interesting message about their new offices all over the world. One such office is in bangalore. They had this to say about it:
Interestingly, when we announced our engineering center in Bangalore, we found ourselves knee-deep in the debate about “outsourcing”—the practice of cutting a company’s American operations in favor of cheaper labor elsewhere. India in particular has been a subject of a lot of press coverage on this topic lately, which we find to be pretty unfair. It’s not their fault they have a lot of brilliant computer scientists who don’t care to relocate to the States.
I was happy to see a US company make a statement such as this. Blaming India and Indians for problems in the US tech sector is foolish. I think the blame india watch does a much better job of discussing this then I possibly can.
I was disappointed to see that the next time I checked Google’s blog, the paragraph about Bangalore had been edited out. Instead, the only mention of Bangalore comes at the end of the blog entry. Its quite possible they felt the article was too long, or the paragraph about Bangalore didn’t fit with the rest of the post. However, I suspect they were in fact worried about the “outsourcing” debate they would find themselves in had they left the post alone.
Regardless of their intentions, Google has probably drawn much more attention to this post then would have been garnered had it been left alone. You can read more about this situation at: Slashdot, MetaFilter, Hello TypePad, Dive into Mark, and CNET News.com.
I’ve retired by blogger blog—again. I don’t use it at all. This was the only post I thought was interesting there, so I’ve posted it here.
by ramanan on August 1 2004, 3:26 pm #