Alec Saunders SquawkBox

So the US Congress has once again hobbled American businesses with their ridiculously low visa quotas. The H1-B quota for the 2009 Fiscal Year (the one that started on October 1, 2008) was filled just one week after the application period started. The US Citizenship and Immigration service received 65,000 applications for the regular H1-B program, plus 20,000 applications from foreign students receiving advanced degrees in the US.  According to InfoWorld, this is the fifth consecutive year that the visa allotment has been filled before the fiscal year begins.

Here's the thing, though.  Congress isn't going to fix the H1-B problem.  Nope.  Not while Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama are strutting the countryside braying about how NAFTA is killing American jobs. 

So, if you're an American business that needs talent, I have a suggestion. Open a Canadian branch office. That's what Microsoft has done, opening a Vancouver based development lab where they're planning to employ nearly 1,000 people.  Canada is brimming with tech talent, and unlike India, we're actually in the same time zone as you are. Heck, 95% of us live within 100 miles of the US border.  We're not even that far away! Plus, it's cheaper to live and do business here, and there are generous government programs that reward companies for doing things like hiring smart new grads.  And speaking of smart new grads, did I mention that the University of Waterloo is one of the best engineering and math universities in the world?  That's why Google opened an office there, and why RIM's development work is done there too.

Why gamble the future of your business on Congress' goofy lottery?  Set up shop up north and never worry about hiring quality talent ever again. 

(Honey!!??  Did you feed the sled dogs??  They keep scratching at the igloo door like they're hungry or something.)

This morning’s Squawk Box never made it to second base. In discussing the trends in mobile telephony, we ranged over a variety of different topics ranging from the “all-in-one” swiss army phone, to the importance of the browser, and a whole whole lot more.

After 48 minutes we cut off the call, and said we’d leave the discussion of Google App Engine for another day. Participants also mailed me to say how much they had enjoyed it. So listen in… you will likely enjoy it too!

 

 Squawk Box April 8 [46:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Over the last few weeks I've had the opportunity to talk with many people about the Microsoft / Yahoo! deal, and I have to say I've encountered a lot of skepticism.  The skeptics range from industry figures (for example, Rob Enderle compares Microsoft's decision to buy Yahoo! in it's fight against Google to the US decision to enter Iraq in order to fight Al Quaeda) to rank and file Microsoft employees who wonder what their company is all about. It's widely held disillusionment.  People are asking why Yahoo! when apparently Microsoft can't fix the problems with its existing products.

One employee, for example, has dumped his Microsoft stock and is actively buying Apple.  "At the last dip in AAPL", he told me, "I backed the truck up to the door and loaded up".  He wonders how Apple can "kick Microsoft's ass" in the smartphone market with a V1, when Microsoft is on V6.   Another wrote me to say "You're saying things I haven't yet figured out how to say. I'm continually frustrated by the lack of vision at the top. This is the only company I've ever been at where everyone knows what the problems are, but no one at the top listens or wants to fix it."

Yesterday should have been a massive eye opener. Google, following Amazon's lead, unveiled Google App Engine - their platform in the sky.  There are countless other startups vying for the same business: Heroku, Bungee, and Joyent for example. Where is Microsoft in all of this? Scrapping with Yahoo! over yesterday's business, the Microsoft employees with an interest in cloud computing having long gone. 

I love Microsoft, or at least the Microsoft I used to know.  I spent nine of the best years of my career working there, in the company of the best and brightest minds I've ever encountered in any environment. I'm frequently nostalgic for those heady days, and remain a die hard Office and Windows user in spite of nearly everyone I know switching to Apple products.  Increasingly, however, I find myself turning to products from companies that satisfy needs that Microsoft doesn't — iPhone as my telephone, and Joyent to host Facebook applications, for example.  

Right now, I worry that the company I used to know is lost. Anti-trust litigation may have broken the back of the OEM PC cash cow that the company has survived upon, but that's not the real issue.  The real problem is that the developer community, the strong backs upon which Microsoft built its empire, are looking elsewhere to solve the development problems they have today — increasingly web development problems. Developers are the canary in the coal mine.  When they lose interest in a platform, that platform business is in deep trouble. 

Google and Amazon, on the other hand, are focusing on the developer needs of today.  Databases, elastic compute clouds, and development platforms, rented by the compute cycle and hosted in the cloud, are allowing businesses large and small to quickly develop and deploy new technologies.  Development tools like Ruby and Python, and frameworks like Rails and Django are making it cost effective to deploy new services at a rate never seen before. 

As one developer said to me "Microsoft has always had undue distraction from competition and that's how they lose markets historically. All you have to do in order to beat Microsoft is go "hey look over here" and then do something else."  Google knows this.  Google's success in search is the distraction that will cause Microsoft to lose the platform, which is the prize that the team in Mountainview are clearly now playing for.

So I ask, in the midst of perhaps the largest threat that the company has ever seen, who really cares if the Chief Yahoo! and his failing business go to Microsoft?   Aren't there bigger issues that need to be faced?

This morning we’re going to talk about the changing landscape in mobile devices. Apple has set the tone of conversation with iPhone, but Microsoft last week announced the inclusion of a full browser in an upcoming version of Windows Mobile, and yesterday Nokia was showing their first touch device code-named “Tube”. Tube? Is that Finnish for something? And what about RIM? What do we think the phone of the future be like and what do we want in it?

Plus - we’ll have a chat about the impact of Google’s announcement of Google App Engine last night. At first blush, a competitor to Amazon Web Services, but with some differences. My question … where’s Microsoft in all of this?