Japan is too much depending on Indian and Chinese IT companies. India and China both are enjoying the Japan market. As once the Indian and Chinese company got work in the Japan, they outsource local office of their country, where engineer’s salary is very low. I found in India, many universities still teaching Basic, Cobol in their syllabus. Even they don’t have Window XP in their Lab in India.

I visited to Chennai and Bangalore also, there I found many companies they have good hardware with pirated software. I visited to many Bangalore’s private educational institute. They claim to teach Java or Visual C++ or AutoCAD in 2 months (daily 2hours Monday to Friday) with total fee 5000 INR (almost 15000 Yen). I approach their labs with the faculty. I found they are using English version of Auto CAD’s latest version. I was so excited and asked to faculty in Japan many of us can’t afford this new version. How much you paid for it in India. He told me it’s 150 INR (almost 450 Yen). This time I came to know it is a pirated AUTO CAD version.

In Japan you have to pay large fee to learn software. With pirated software we can’t run business in Japan. If there is no low cost software institute in Japan, how can Japanese students learn software?

I met many small companies IT engineers from the overseas. Many of them are using pirated version or trial version of software to build an application.

Why Japan is so hungry for automation? This is very tough time in Japan as many Japanese companies are going bankruptcy. Japanese people don’t have money. It is the cost cutting period (節約時代) in Japan, why Japan should waste money for automation. As Japanese company has to buy software license, that money goes to America. They need Indian or Chinese engineer to build an application, that money goes to India or China. What we gain after automation, we have to cut Japanese staff.

Read this article from this link. Gates warns against reliance on outsourcing.

http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/story/0,10801,102848,00.html

June 29, 2005 (IDG News Service) — TOKYO — Companies should not outsource their core business functions and staff, Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates told a group of Japan’s top businessmen today.
Gates, who was speaking at the Nippon Keidanren (Japan Business Federation), Japan’s biggest and most influential business group, urged IT companies to beware of outsourcing too much to save costs and to keep their key engineering resources and intellectual property at home.
“If you rely too much on people in other companies and countries … you are outsourcing your brains, where you are making all the innovation,” he said.
The need to maintain a competitive edge by investing rather than cost-cutting was a theme that Gates returned to several times in an address to a group of leading Japanese IT and consumer industrialists that included Hajime Sasaki, chairman of NEC Corp., and Tadashi Okamura, chairman of Toshiba Corp., both of whom had front-row seats.
Too many U.S. companies were cutting their research and development budgets at a time when investment in these areas is needed to cope with an increasingly competitive global market economy, he said.
At a national level, both the U.S. and Japan need to train more and better engineers if their economies are to stay at the cutting edge of technological innovation, which would create value that helps support both countries’ high standards of living, he said.
Gates cast the U.S. and Japan as competing in a global market economy that had grown from about 1 billion people 20 years ago to 4 billion people. In this expanded, increasingly competitive economy, India and China are training engineers who are driving their economies forward, yet Japan and the U.S. aren’t keeping up, he said.
“The number of students in engineering and IT is going down. … Staying ahead means setting a very high bar,” Gates said.