Tom Plate, UCLA professor and recidivist San Francisco Chronicle columnist, has an uncanny ability to pen a line that is either nonsensical, irrelevant or just plain wrong. In today's column he scores a trifecta:
The Gates gift [to fight AIDS in India] also demonstrates an increasingly potent phenomenon of globalization: the intimate interconnectedness between what is important locally and what is important globally. All along the West Coast of the United States, Indians dominate the software spotlight of the American computer world.I've been in the software business for over fifteen years and I have no idea what Plate means by the "software spotlight". It is true that many of the most talented and successful people in the industry happen to be Indian or Indian-American. But it would be a stretch to say that Indians dominate the software industry. Then again, Plate didn't say that they dominate the "software industry", only the "software spotlight", whatever it is. And as far as what's important globally and locally -- over the years I've had many conversations on serious issues with my numerous friends and colleagues from India. As with many people in the software business, one of their main concerns seems to be not the spread of the AIDS virus, but the spread of Windows viruses and Bill Gates' unhealthy domination of the American software industry. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 15, 2002 10:50 PM