Outsourcing

I find it pretty interesting, this whole.

Outsourcing thing, because there's a big brouhaha.

About it right now. But this started a long time ago. In the early 80s all companies had.

Their own manufacturing for computers.

Grid had its own manufacturing plant right here in Mountain View, then in Fremont. And now no one would do that. But back then that was the way we did it. And some one day the VP of.

Manufacturing came in and said, you know what?

I think we can do this church cheaper and better and higher quality if we have someone else manufacturer who's really.

Good at this stuff and we're not very good at it.

And so that's what we did. And so outsourcing and manufacturing started happening.

In the early 80s. And now of course people were talking about outsourcing of support centers and software engineering and so on.

I'm a pretty, I guess I'm pretty much of a globalist. I can't see the difference between outsourcing.

Jobs to Georgia and outsourcing jobs to India.

Basically you have to have a fairly.

Non world view to see that one is better than the other.

And if people in India need the.

Jobs and they're poor, I don't see.

Any reason why they shouldn't have it. And maybe that sounds unpatriotic or something like that, but I kind of look.

At the world globally and I say.

Gee, those people need this work and.

So do these people.

But who am I to decide who.

In the world should get a job or shouldn't get a job?

So there's an overarching philosophy on my part now, the decision whether you outsource. We don't sit around going, should we outsource or not? No, it doesn't work like that. You say, hey, at this point in time, what's the best thing I can do? What's going to progress my goal the best? Where am I going to get the support? We sometimes bring things in and sometimes we push things out. We've gone both ways now we outsource some of our design, but we've brought some of it back in. Some of the hardware engineering is out, some of it's back in at any point in time. For example, if a product is a fairly easy product to design, like you've.

Done a bunch of them already, so.

We'Re doing a new pda. It's fairly straightforward. We'll probably find a better solution someplace.

Else in the world that has a.

Pool of engineers that are really good at this. If we're doing something that's really unique and hasn't been done before. It's probably better to have it closer to home in our own labs, because we're going to be sitting there minute to minute, figuring out what we got wrong and trying to experiment and so on. So as a general rule, we tend to have inside or closer to home.

Things that are most challenging and interesting. Not interesting, but challenging new.

And as it becomes more of a commodity, then you can find more people.

And more places to do it, and you can reduce your cost and so on.

So that's the general philosophy. And I don't think it's going necessarily always going one way or the other way.

I think the world is becoming global.

And there are people really smart and really motivated all around the world.

Not just North America, not just Japan, not just wherever your favorite country is, Finland.

And so don't fight that thing, just go with it. It's not like some evil plan to.

Deprive people of someplace of something.

It's just what it is.

It's a globalized world and there's very little you can do about it. I think it's a good thing, actually. I'm not embarrassed by it at all.