Screenshots

Surely what this N.R. Narayana Murthy said cannot be true, many Indonesians can attest to that. Some of them like construction workers find very little trouble at all getting PRs.
Even people like Abu Bakar Bashir and Hambali have been let in before therefore I am sure IT specialists from India or anywhere should not have any problem.

Sure we have great visions. We have grand visions (Wawasan 2020). We always have all kind of visions and slogans.

We are also good at setting up various task forces, throwing money into building technology and business 'parks'.

Where's the follow-up execution? Nada..

Paul Graham recently wrote that in order to reproduce another silicon valley (the one in CALI, US that is), you need three main criterias - money, the right city and the right talent. Now the first thing Malaysia government needs to do is not to go straight and tackle problems from these three angles, but to humbly admit that we are in fact inadequate in these areas.

http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

I can say for sure that if we allow 15,000 low-wage Indians, God help the local graduates!

I think the Govt had to weigh the political costs versus the financial gains, if any, arising from allowing Infosys free run of the country.

We like Caucasians, but we don't like Indians. We know MNCs won't send too many high-cost Caucasians, but I'm sure Infosys will swamp the country with lotsa Indians -- some even good-looking ones, and where does that leave the single Malay chaps?

You are right that this country is ambivalent about many things.

it is a lot to fix ... one of them, in order to emulate the startup energy, innovation of silicon valley must surely be protection of intellectual property. Do we have the legal system in place for this. Do we have the legal expertise for this. I am sure that cyberjaya was not purpose built simply to become a backroom database processing area ... we only have what money can buy, what about what money cannot buy - all the tacit knowledge that is required.

IT people are IT people..they have never heard the word "grease".

Sometime grease make things move easier..and faster.

Prohibitive immigration laws?? Me don't thinks so....Jan says "many Indonesians can attest to that. Some of them like construction workers find very little trouble at all getting PRs."

Najib's action just for show..it is not the instructions...it is the little napoleons who run the dept as though they own it.

Yumcious makes an interesting point about "cheap" indians flooding the country displacing woefully unskilled local graduates. The fact is that Indian engineers are no longer that "cheap". Their wages are on par with Malaysian counterpart and keeps growing due to a healthy domestic job market. To attract them here your need to entice them with double the rate that our locals expect. However I agree that there is a hidden agenda somewhere to prevent/discourage immigrants who would subscribe to the "non-bumi" quota.

Just read the article and the quote of the day is from Lim Keng Yaik's office (Communications Ministry) which declined to be interviewed and said "the internet was not his responsibility"...WOW.
If that's not a "tidak apa" statement I dunno what is...

When I first read about this, the saying 'you reap what you sow' came to mind. After stacking these departments with the most 'fanatic' of public servants whose sole duty was to throw the spanner at every solution to the people's problems, the diehard civil servant now can't come out from his 'dukacita dimaklumkan' mode. I have posted on the above topic too. Also a hard hitting article on Malaysia's Immigration Department - An International Disgrace.

I was just wondering what took them so long to publish your interview. To my knowledge, the MSC 10th Anniversary Celebration was 2 months ago.

Backlog? Better late than never?

Yeah-that classic Lim Keng Yaik's statement-"Internet is not my business"

Intelligent and well trained specialists/engineers create jobs and not take away them as some pseudo nationalists/racists would like us to think.

That's why Singapore is always ahead of us in this value added game.

well what can we do when the wheels of Govt .enforcement needs to be greased. the liitle napoleans all the the divisons. god help us malaysia

The fact that Murthy was compelled to bring it up direct to Najib, speaks volume of the malaise that forever will incapacitate this country. He simply could not make any headway trying to go through proper channels.

Will we ever learn? No, because we are just ignorant and clueless. Immediate solution? Set up MDC office in India ASAP! Should I say more ...

If it takes one Murthy to shock a DPM, I hope every other big shot IT companies will pull the plug on us.

They gotta do it right away with little mercy. Soft blow won't do it.

By then hopefully the PM will get the shock and launch another unpronouncable 5-letters initiative that vaguely resembles action.

Dear Jeff,

I think it is unfair to attack the gov on this one.

Looking back at the MSC original objectives, Infosys and 15,000 Indians really weren't what MSC was about.

Outsourcing is not really silicon-valley type of business. It is more like what is a non-silicon-valley type of business.

So, if on one hand we say MSC wants to be like silicon-valley, then of course MSC is not too keen on outsourcing at that time. It doesn't make sense to put in a lot of expensive infra and just aim for outsourcing. We don't have the manpower and the wages to go into that kind of business big time. We would not have benefitted much too, even if Infosys were to come in in 2000.

Maybe the housing and land development would benefit some developer companies but overall, how we could have benefited from Infosys coming in with 15,000 of their own people is not straight-forward.

More importantly, I think, it wasn't part of the plan.

KB

As one person mentioned, Indian fresh graduates are now earning more than RS25,000 in India (which translates to >RM$2000). I think this is more than what fresh grads in Malaysia make. If they end up in the US, they make over US$6,000 a month.
If Indian IT workers do come to Malaysia.....believe me, it is just a stepping stone for them to eventually land up in US.

JEFF OOI says: Are we saying we should pity Mauritiius for having received investments from Infosys?

yeah, outsourcing and employing foreign professionals were never part of the MSC plan. I am sure our universities producing thousands and thousands of IT graduates who are unemployable because they dont have the skills required by foreign multinationals wasn't part of the plan either. it is just too bad it is a sad reality.

I thought the MDC (multimedia development corporation) are suppose to deal with foreign investor, including PR for workers. The above sums up that they are not up to scratch.
Anyway, I thought the super corridor was to initiate Malaysian inventiveness, creativity and vigour in IT sector (much like silicon valley). Anybody out there can list any achievement made the these Malaysian entepreneurs??? Or are we always dependent on foreign nvestors.

As KampungBoy stated the original objective of MSC was not to concentrate on outsourcing. The more correct statement would be to say MSC was not meant to concentrate on SSO/BPO (shared services/business process outsourcing). Instead it was supposed to attract MNC's like Microsoft, SUN, HP etc to set up their design/development centres here, which can be construed as a higher-value added type of outsourcing, which would have taken our skill levels up a notch similar to Singapore. MDC FAILED in this objective. The next step would have been to pursuade high-tech companies to use Malaysia as a regional HQ for their Asia-Pacific or SEA markets. This had limited success as we saw companies like Siemens and Huawei doing so. The only part that MDC had any measure of success was in bringing in outsourcing operations from companies looking to outsource their IT support and SSO/BPO activities. Even then these centres were usually back-up centres to larger HQ's based in India or US. Since then our Govt. from the PM down to MDC keep harping on how successful the MSC has been because we're getting all these companies setting up shop here. That's the only area that MDC has had any measure of success in and that too is due to the low cost of our local labor. If the cost increases then these MNC's won't hesitate to jump to other lower cost countries such as the Phillipines, Thailand etc. The failure of MSC is similar to the failure of every other govt. related agency..A complete lack of accountability..