While not the central theme of this attached article, it
does strike me as odd that they are promoting Terminal (a hybrid app
development/engineering labor platform) as opening an “international
office.” Terminal focuses on providing
lower cost skilled labor for select app developers and designers. Essentially this is moving capital to markets
with a greater surplus of labor, a staple of multinational business. With NAFTA 2.0 on the horizon, is it possible
we will see some of the “international offices” of large textile manufacturers
returning to the South?
My point is what Terminal is promising is not nearly as
cutting edge or even novel. The premise
is that new startups, often with little cash on hand, have difficulty paying
the market rate for engineers based in Silicon Valley. Instead, they can partner with Terminal which
will not only provide the cheap foreign labor but the prestige of opening an
“international office”. This way the
VCs, idea men, and exceptionally skilled programmers can continue to live in
Silicon Valley while the actual labor force is paid cheaply abroad, a situation
at least as old as the hunter gatherer model.
One novelty of the Terminal model is that Terminal has
absorbed some of the higher capital costs, providing a workspace, workstations,
and the logistics of an international office.
This way the Terminal client can focus on production and take advantage
of this division of labor without an expensive outlay of capital. It appears the app industry is trending
toward its more mature cousins like the textile industry, where often the
research, design and development is centralized and production localized where
labor costs are cheaper.
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