Carol Bartz CEO of Autodesk 13 years ago(longest serving CEO in tech industry among non-founders) shares some interesting perspectives about the future of the tech industry
On Outsourcing:Favorite example is a little company in Tennessee. They designed a pellet stove using our 3-D software but couldn’t find a local foundry that would make it for the right price. So they went online and found a manufacturer in China. Never went there: streamed the drawings with our software over the Internet; got the stoves manufactured and shipped in. Now sales are $2 million a year. we now have an eight-person company with a $2 million run rate that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Why is that bad for the American economy?
Impressions about India after her recent trip : She says starstruck by India.There will come a time when it will be harder and harder to do business in China because they will want to do everything themselves. But India, with its federal system and a style that we better understand, and of course its huge population, will be a nice way to counterbalance the strength of China.
On pessimism about tech prospects: Five years after 2000, people either believe that it’s going to come back or else have gone totally into a black mindset that says it never will and woe is us. The Indians are optimistic. The Chinese are optimistic. Even the Japanese are getting optimistic. And we’re down in the mud. That is nonsense. The world is a cycle. You just don’t know amplitude and frequency. So the folks that say it will never be again—I guarantee they are wrong. It’s as simple as that.
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