Cloud Manufacturing

After a rather long hiatus, I am back. I came across this very enlightening Thomas Friedman Op-Ed in today's (April 18, 2010) New York Times that I would like to share with the readers of My Outsourcing Pundit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/opinion/18friedman.html?hp

I know all of you are very busy professionals; so here’s a short synopsis of this Op-Ed:

You’ve heard that saying: As General Motors goes, so goes America. While we all wish the new GM the very best; however, the companies that will fuel the growth in the United States in the 21^st century are companies like EndoStim. EndoStim, a medical start-up headquartered in St. Louis, Oklahoma, is developing programmable implanted electro-medical devices to treat various gastrointestinal neuro-muscular disorders like GERD.

There’s no idea if their product will succeed in the marketplace. It’s still in testing. What’s really neat about EndoStim is how the company was formed and is being run today. According to Friedman, “Here’s the short version: EndoStim was inspired by Cuban and Indian immigrants to America and funded by St. Louis venture capitalists. Its prototype is being manufactured in Uruguay, with the help of Israeli engineers and constant feedback from doctors in India and Chile. Oh, and the C.E.O. is a South African, who was educated at the Sorbonne, but lives in Missouri and California, and his head office is basically a BlackBerry. While rescuing General Motors will save some old jobs, only by spawning thousands of EndoStims — thousands — will we generate the kind of good new jobs to keep raising our standard of living.”

Friedman continues on: “This kind of very lean start-up, where the principals are rarely in the same office at the same time, and which takes advantage of all the tools of the flat world — teleconferencing, e-mail, the Internet and faxes — to access the best expertise and low-cost, high-quality manufacturing anywhere, is the latest in venture investing. You’ve heard of cloud computing. I call this “cloud manufacturing.”

So rather than complain about outsourcing through crazy rhetoric, we should be focusing on how to create new jobs in the United States by embracing the various tools of the new flat world.

Friedman ends his Op-Ed by stating: “You don’t hear much about companies like this. Our national debate today is dominated by the ignorant ramblings of Sarah Palin, talk-show lunatics, tea parties and politics as sports — not ESPN but PSPN. Fortunately, though, we still have risk-takers who are not paying attention to any of this nonsense, who know what world they’re living in — and are just doing it. Thank goodness!”