Web Suppliers – From Ukraine and Russia
I had to hesitate before writing this title, but actually, there is little point in trying to mollify or lessen the impact. Obviously, Ukraine and Russia are in the news and pointedly Russia is behaving atrociously.
That aside, just for a moment, and we should take a little Stock here. We in the West are at least partly to blame in some small way. For years successful Agencies have outsourced computer work to other poorer parts of the world, India, Indonesia and also Easter Europe.
Eastern Europe is a hot spot of digital creativity – whether, in design or programming skills, they have it in droves.
At NCompass, we’ve never liked the idea of outsourcing. Not because we don’t want to employ or help others, but because of the difficulty in communications, when we have outsourced there becomes a huge amount of back and forth before we can either get our ideas across to the developers or indeed we can present something to you, our clients.
Outsourcing is tricky and difficult and as time has moved on less profitable, the successful programmers in less developed countries than ours are able to command better prices and fair dues to them. But the other thing that is changing is our reliance on larger Template-driven websites.
Again, nothing truly wrong with this, but we should be aware. Those clever people in poorer countries have in their free time, when not employed by water organisations, been busy, they make widgets and gismos that fit into our needs. Templates, Plugins, Apps, APIs and connectors. it is all programming and development and just requires a coder to build anything he can think of.
I noticed all this when updating a theme recently – the Theme developer’s website had been hacked and was showing very graphical videos of the war in Ukraine. It was not pleasant watching.
We’ve heard of the Cyberwar, we’ve heard of the hacking and the abilities of Russin or Ukrainian programmers to get into governments and business websites and manipulate what they want. And it’s all very real.
We should take warning from it as we build our future based on Tech. I was asked in a survey recently, do I think a Car can be taken over while I am driving it – yes… do I think people can spy on our activities on our mobiles – yes… People say – why would they bother, but the tragic news is they do bother at every opportunity.
The same is true of our websites – if we depend too much on all the clever wizardry that is not our own – what then. Yes, our business and life will be shut down. If Microsoft and Google were to truly pull out of Russia, then how many businesses and people would be affected. Hundreds of Thousands is my estimate.
So a bit like our reliance on Gas and Oil to power our western ways, equally we’ve been building an Internet that relies on the unreliable, we think it will be OK… but when it’s not – it isn’t. Did we know that 25% of the Gas market in the UK was directly between UK Businesses and Gazprom? Most of us hadn’t even heard of Gazprom.
The lesson here is that we should take stock from time to time. Are we using the American based WordPress, Or Candian based Shopify, if we’re selling our products via Amazon are we aware of how many non-English people work in their warehouses and why don’t we care more that they pay well and look after their staff better.
Everyone in the West needs to make a living, but even in Website Design, even in Hosting are we aware of just how much that is dependent on places like Ukraine, Russia and many others.
Now for something a little lighter. All our Hosting is now 100% Green Powered and UK Based. When you take services with us, our Domain Name supplier is in Glouster, our Hosting is in Guildford, Reading and Derbyshire, we are proud that only use UK Companies for our needs where we can.
That’s not to say we are anti-foreigner, but for us, it just makes sense to buy local, in the long run, it just has to be better in all respects, environmentally and educationally. What we find too scary when outsourcing to foreign countries is that it’s usually done to save costs. This has to be a false economy in the long run.