Apple has announced that it has released all 30 employees in their Bangalore office who were supposed to end up comprising 600 support and development staff in total. Offshore product development and support is not a model that works for all companies and environments, but surely the ramifications were known by Apple’s due diligence. They did their due diligence, no?
The fact that Apple pulled the plug so soon into their offshore development and support efforts really says something about the management or the lack thereof. Did they learn something in the short two months that they were in operation that justified a show-stopper? There should have been no surprises going into this endeavor from an operational perspective. The numbers are clear and the factors of production are known.
It’s not like they didn’t have years of case studies available from high priced consultants to gauge customer reaction (and every other metric for that matter) if that was the reason for pulling out. It’s simply irresponsible to make such far reaching initiatives and then bail on the entire effort before really getting past the starting line. Shareholders should be inflamed for such high-school like management practices.
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Maybe they didn’t know all about that monsoon season thing?
Honestly. If they could see it in black and white that they were about to go down the wrong track, I applaud them for taking the hit early and moving on. Just look at the money that Microsoft is spending on all this websearch and other features just to play catch up. What they need to do is move on and start thinking of something new.
It was a really short-lived yet expensive fishing expedition on Apple’s part. And now there are 30 people who are out of jobs who once had one.