God help us

CAGR Salary growth in China and India, is double digits, between 10-20% per annum. US CAGR is negligable. If India is 64k already, on a cost basis relocating staff to india makes little sense, especially when computing a 5 year forecast plan like JC likes to do.

Headcount costs are an overly simplified and myopic metric, but simple to compute. American Corps get tax benefits for offshore opEX, there are revenue and branding and licensing profit diversions, and lax regulations, and taxes advantages in emerging markets.

the real issue is building R&D organizations which produce world class products. to collaborate efficiently in offshore/multisite development. headcount costs don’t consider any of these costs. research shows that core development teams working in a geographic in areas of core competency, way out-perform, the overly simplistic ‘offshore headcount’ paradigm. google understands this, and manages accordingly. thats why they continue to invest all over, especially in the bay area.

JC hasn’t done a very good job of managing CSCO; he pretty much grows it into boom then bust. In 2001, he claimed it was his biggest failure, yet here we go again.. surprise surprise.

Cisco is too big, should be split up in to fledgling emerging market companies, which would permit a greater share valuation for investors and employees. You can’t aggregate 60% growth in a small emerging market into a large 10%/annum growth company, it just doesn’t scale.
But JC insists.. this is the way.

Cisco has lost 2 extremely excellent CEO replacements cause of chamber’s obstinate ways. If JC does this at the top of CSCO, the raises and career growth opportunities, are certainly stiffled. The CEO sets the tone for the entire organization.

so again, the employees feel the pain, of staff compression, layoffs, workload expansion, little stock appreciation, disruptions, shareholders get marginal appreciation, and the industry gets expensive moderately emerging products.

Moving CSCO around the globe won’t make it perform better. The problem resides here on Tasman… ,

Chambers continues to sail the ship of Cisco, like Capt’n Jack, down the next trough, into the next big swell, employees and products swept overboard.