Guest Blogger: Pavan Muzumdar

Pavan Muzumdar is our guest blogger this week. Pavan is the CEO of MV Software Company and the Programs Committee Chairperson for the Detroit / Great Lakes Chapter of the MIT Enterprise Forum.  He is also a coach for the Great Lakes Entrepreneurs Quest business plan competition. 

Check back here each weekday to read Pavan’s thoughts on entrepeneurship and competing in the global market . 

Want to join the conversation? Please send your comments to: feedback@metromodemedia.com

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04.05.07
Post No 1

The Good, the bad, and the evil

British spammers don’t like Nigel Roberts. He sues them. On December 12th, 2005, he received £300 as a settlement for a suit he brought against Media Logistics (UK) Ltd., a company that he claimed sent him spam email messages.

It wasn’t easy, and you could argue that for the amount of time he spent in preparing the paperwork, the money he received wasn’t worth it.  Paying a lawyer would be even more expensive. But for Roberts it was the principle.  

But what if you could ship the work to an offshore location and have someone put all the paperwork together for you? That would be a lot cheaper than hiring a lawyer here.   

Here’s the pitch: SueASpammer.com will take your spam messages, track down the spammer and for a piece of the action sue them in small claims court for you. All you do is show up and collect your money!

If you’re like me, receiving more spam than I wish to delete, this would be a good thing. Local lawyers can rest assured that their billing rates are secure – for now. SueASpammer.com doesn’t exist.

Michigan on the other hand is a bit bruised from the whole off-shoring, outsourcing thing. Toyota is clobbering the domestics in the market-place and China is the new destination for manufacturing. Ask someone who has lost a job to an offshore manufacturer, and this is a bad dream come true.

Others say that the very fabric of our country’s work force is threatened by the evil companies that take our jobs away in the pursuit of more profits.

Successful products and services are good, cheap, and useful. The better we can make it, the cheaper we can make it, and the more useful we can make it, whatever “it” is, the more successful it will be. That’s it.  The rest is chaff.

Cheaper ingredients make for cheaper products. Labor is a major ingredient so it’s no surprise that with our standards of living, it’s not cheap here.

But there’s another way, of making stuff cheap: knowing how to make lots of it easily and faster. And we all know, cheaper is not better, and cheaper is not more useful.  

There’s only one way to make lots of stuff more easily, faster, better, and more useful:  out-thinking the competition. And that’s one thing that can never be outsourced.

Tomorrow:  Let’s change the discussion

Photograph © Dave Krieger