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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (65329)	3/30/2004 6:51:18 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77397

What we as shareholders should be doing is demanding that executives get offshored or their salaries come back to reality. Hmmm... but we as shareholders shouldn't be demanding that engineers get offshored or their salaries come back to reality??? Which fiduciary duty do shareholders have? Seems to me you also want the garbage taken away, but only if it's dumped on someone else's property. I do agree with this premise: companies have a fiduciary duty to seek the highest marginal rate of return on capital - whether it's sourcing of components, engineering talent, or executives. The latter two are sourced on the labor market. Which is global. Which means a changing mix of on-shore and off-shore participation as radius of service in the market is affected by shifts in underlying technologies. But let's not be so naive to believe that we'll end up with the same shifts. The labor market for executives is not the same as for engineers. It is much more highly differentiated, and locality of flesh-pressers has a much more significant component to it than keyboard jockeys, for example. Transportation technology increased the radius of service for textiles to almost infinite. And domestic cotton ceased to be a major component of the US economy. Despite a serious impact this had on several major economic centers, and the very big deal this was to some North Americans, the vast majority of the rest of us now enjoy much less expensive cotton clothing. The Internet and the modern productivity toolkit has dramatically increased the radius of service for high tech engineers. Less so for managers, and even less so for executives. Based on history, it's a pretty good guess what happens next. Carly Fiorina makes 10-20x what offshore executives at Tata and wipro make, for essentially the same job. That's a load of oats! After being digested and excreted by a horse, that is. Not the "10-20x" part, but the "essentially the same" part. If you don't know what the job is, you might want to refrain from commenting on what it's worth.