IT Companies

Infosys has fired 2100 employees and  a confirmation from ex-Infosys employees about layoffs.  The problem is that when you provide services to only a few major customers, your fortunes are tied to how well their business does.  Compared to developing a product, providing a service is not very risky , but is very labour intensive.  Since there are only 24 hours in a day, at some stage you are forced to hire people to scale and then manage them.

If you develop a technology or even understand it better than others, the entry barriers are very high and it is difficult to replicate it easily.  Indian IT companies have a lot of cash reserves, so could afford to take risks. Unfortunately they did not.

More on the Infosys employee firing technique – in India the employees are forced to “resign” , this is how layoffs are implemented by HR departments.   Feel sorry for the ex-employees, actually rating systems in most companies are not fair,  many employees who are good at office politics often get good ratings, though they do little work.

Google

Though Google’s official motto is  “Do no evil” , they certainly do hire evil employees.  Internet marketer sues Google employee .

When I was using Adsense on my websites , I always felt that the code was used to track the websites  I owned , how I marketed them, how I gathered content for my website and to collect a lot of other information.  It may not be their official policy yet, but they definitely do not have good systems in place to prevent malpractices.

Venture Capital Funding

This post on  Google’s venture capital arm  Google Ventures , summarises what  I have believed for long

Corporate venture capital, according to many, constricts innovation rather than foster it. I’m inclined to go with the view, particularly as speculationGoogle launching a venture capital arm called Google Ventures. The Mountain View, California-headquartered search giant has not yet confirmed these news reports. mounts again about

No matter how it is packaged, the venture investing model followed by the likes of Intel, Cisco Systems, Motorola and so on ultimately exists to serve one purpose — incubate external tech labs with the objective of either absorbing those emerging technologies within the larger company or to simply arrest the growth of a competitive technology

Many of these companies will go to any length to destroy a competitor , from spying on activities to dumping viruses and launching DDOS attacks.  So the less they know about you, the better.