C'mon Chris, it's you who taught me that Moscow isn't Russia. Different living standards, different access to technology, etc.
Joanna
Chris Doss wrote:
1) I don't know how the hell Tahoo is going to compete with Yandex.ru and Rambler.ru, which are entrenched in the Russian market and giant.
2) I don't get how computers are a "luxury" in Russia. Most everybody I know has one. Hell, you can use one in an Internet cafe in Moscow for $1 an hour, like I'm doing right now. It is true that Russia has a mobile-phone mania; one in four Russians owns a mobile phone, as opposed in one in 20 in 1998.
RIA Novosti March 26, 2004 RUSSIA: THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL PROGRAMMER
MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti analyst Vladimir Simonov).
In a few weeks, the US Internet giant Yahoo! will open an e-mail portal in the Russian language, the company has announced.
At the first sight the decision seem strange. Yahoo! is well aware of the fact that although access to the Internet in Russia is growing, it is still confined to 10 million people. Computers here are still a luxury, so the average Russian prefers to pay $0.20 for a minute on his or her mobile to $0.75 for an hour on the net.
Yahoo!, however, is not concealing its motives. In opening the Russian-language portal, the concern recognises the powerful potential of the Russian-speaking web market, which also embraces 35 million Russian-speaking people abroad. Russia's international reputation as a country of computer talents may have played a role as well.
Unfortunately, for a long time the West considered them to be the devil incarnates. The television and press were full of stories about St Petersburg hacker Vladimir Levin, who defrauded Citibank, and Oleg Zverev, who hacked through Bloomberg's firewall and then politely offered the agency's owner, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to restore it for $200,000.
There is no arguing that Russia still remains a Klondike for computer hackers and spammers. There are rumours that even this year's most aggressive and destructive virus, Mydoom, which has paralysed hundreds of thousands of computers and inflicted worldwide losses of $30 billion, was invented somewhere in Russia. The country has fallen behind in drafting laws against cyber crimes. The West knows better than Russia how much it costs to establish at least the basics of law, order and morals on the national Internet. Of course, Moscow does not have money to spare for that.
However, even in the mid-1990s, Russia's computer talents shifted from destruction to creation. Unfortunately, at that stage they did it mostly for foreign companies.
The army of first-class computer specialists, groomed at secret Soviet defence enterprises, received the opportunity to go abroad. Russian brains started to quickly fill foreign, mainly American, companies.
California's Silicon Valley began speaking Russian. Today, one in three Microsoft programmers was born in the USSR.
Times change, however. Russia's rapid economic growth and the stability acquired in recent years have shown Russian computer specialists that they do not have to try their luck abroad. Overcoming the lack of investment and bureaucratic obstacles, they are confidently entering the offshore programming market, i.e., the market of creating computer programs commissioned from abroad.
This enticing market is worth an estimated $30 billion a year. China, Taiwan, Israel and India are the strongest players on it today, but in 2003 Russia earned $500 million, double the previous year's figure. The surging demand for Russian software suggests that Russia will soon be able to eclipse the traditional figures in the niche.
The achievements of Russian programmers are becoming increasingly impressive. Here are some landmarks: in 1991, the Russian company ParaGraph sold Apple Computers the licence for original software to read manuscripts. Later, Russia's Stipler managed to attract the attention of the Corel corporation to its system for electronic tables. Finally, in April 2003, Russia's Spirit Corp and the large US equipment producer Texas Instruments signed the largest licence deal in Russia for Internet-telephony software.
The result was that prodigal programmers started coming back to their home country. Although their salaries are still lower, qualified Russian "brains" are returning to Russia, because they believe there are more opportunities here. Another reason is that modern technologies allow people to co-operate even though they are in different countries. For example, programmer Andrei Terekhov works miracles for the California-based company Start Up from the comfort of his St Petersburg apartment. The company's head Wivik Vathva is so pleased with his Russian employee that he calls him the second Einstein.
Even the Moscow-based producer of popular anti-virus software, Kaspersky Labs, is quickly gaining international influence. The pony-tailed former Soviet Defence Ministry programmer Yevgeny Kapsersky is now managing a company with 300 employees together with his wife Natalya. Kaspersky Labs supply software to 35-50% of Russia's corporate clients, while it recently opened branches in Britain and Germany. Kaspersky believes that cyber terrorists are dividing spheres of influence on the web. "The fight is not only between good and evil, but also between evil and evil, like the USSR and the USA used to fight," he says. Happily, Russian computer talents now side with good more often than not.
