Does IT matter for South Africa?
Posted
Wednesday, December 07, 2005 11:19 AM
by
rudolf
I posted a link on Sadev about an article I discovered on
the net (ironically from a computer hardware related site) in which they tell
about Microsoft planning to open 30 new R & D centers in '3rd world' type
countries. South Africa
was conveniently or deliberately left out. It made me start thinking how much
do we really do (developers and Microsoft employees of this country) to
encourage research into new development and other markets.
The government is pretty useless to expect pushing such an endeavor so someone
else must do it. Microsoft is already doing a lot - mostly helping themselves
[read our money] by increasing their revenue but at least they are busy with
something.
The average business in this country is finding it hard to innovate, especially
on the software arena - so it seems. Our big companies don't invest in
technology heavily that could benefit the man on the street, only stuff that
will increase their profit margins. I suppose there is little incentive to do
otherwise since the government won't help them in turn. Then there is the whole
Telkom 'thing' so the IT budget is heavily spent on line rentals etc...
http://www.sadeveloper.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=65587
Just imagine telecommunications being cheap in this country (a wild dream I
know). Perhaps then we might be allowed to work partially from home saving on
fuel and pollution and hospital bills for all the high blood pressures being
stuck in traffic etc, etc, etc. Ok so that is a super wild dream...
Back to the original story. Imagine the educational and R& D 'industries' can improve, this country might actually stand a chance to compete with the outside world. Microsoft could [if they wanted] open such centers here for each big city - heck, we only have about 4 or 5 of them! They and us could all benefit from this on the long run.
So please MS, considder this to help this country that has a lot of potential.