Parchayi.com – Personal Finance Simplified

I’m not an MS investor but I do use Windows everyday and I also have a really nice Windows Mobile phone.

As a developer, I figured, let’s see what it takes to make Windows Mobile touchscreen app. I quickly figured out that the free versions of Visual Studio (called Express editions) do not support mobile application development. What kind of brain dead decision is that? Who wants to buy something just so that they can support Windows mobile (not the most popular mobile OS anyway). The only worse offender in this regards is Apple, which gives you the development tools free but a Mac is required.

Anyway, VS.net professional is free for me because I work at a University so I download and install that from dreamcast. And to my surprise, unlike Apple, Blackberry, Palm and Nokia, Microsoft has no touch friendly development tools. Also it is nearly impossible to make use of hardware features of phones without relying on third party unsupported tools. Using the camera is painful. Accelerometer, forget about it. What is Microsoft thinking?

The new HTC, Samsung and other Windows Mobile touchscreens are all great devices but it we can’t easily develop for them, how is WinMo ever going to catch up in apps with Apple, Blackberry or anyone else?

The manufacturers of phones are also partly to blame for this. They make applications for their own devices that are sweet but don’t provide APIs for others to use. Maybe they are dragging Microsoft with them. Maybe MS can force their hands into making some kind of standard? Maybe MS can include some APIs with VS? Will it happen? Not a chance.

Recently I noticed that if you want to use the ribbon interface (which stinks, especially with people moving to widescreens and the inability of the riboom to be vertical) in your own application, you need a license from Microsoft? What the hell? Also the license seems to be evil, really evil.

I think that Visual Studio is the best IDE ever and was very happy when I first heard that the Express editions wil be free. But with such crappy practices from Microsoft, it might slowly lose its charm thanks to restrictions on developers. What will Microsoft do next? Not let people use VS to make apps that are similar to Microsoft Apps? Who will use VS then?

My work involves (mostly) web development using mostly non-Microsoft technologies and IE is my worst nightmare.  I just don’t understand how a company with the resources of Microsoft consistently makes the worst browser of the lot.  Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and the rest of the laundry list of browsers are all faster, more standards compliant and better to develop for than IE. For most good web developers, web applications are developed in two steps. First steps involve making a site that works in other browsers (if it works in one, it generally works in all the others). The second step involves adding hacks to make the site work in IE because that is the only browser that doesn’t behave well.

In the last few years, Microsoft has done many things (non development related) wrong too:

1. Released Vista before it was ready
2. Released Win7 (which is nice based on my first impression of an install in a virtual machine) faster giving the impression that skipping Vista is the wise thing to do
3. Corrupted ISO with the whole OOXML standard scandal. Also released badly broken OOO support in Office.

Every year someone or the other claims that it is the year of the Linux desktop. If Microsoft continues down this path of self destruction, maybe one day it will be as the Linuxes all improve each year in significant ways that are not all related to eye-candy.  The only software that Microsoft makes that don’t have worthy alternatives are the Office Suite and Exchange. And people make so many Windows apps because Windows is easy to develop for. I don’t understand why MS wants to throw a wrench in its own machinery. But hey, what do I know?

Something interesting for those of you who are still sticking to XP like me – Seven Remix XP

Anyway, the moral of the story – I’m not buying Microsoft stock anytime soon.

Here is a list of ETFs that invest Primarily in India

Here is a list of Indian ADRs. More info and links will be added in the next few days.

Over the last few weeks, the Indian stock market skyrocketed after the elections and most of my Good Till Cancelled orders for buying INP are of no use now. I missed the opportunity to buy then and I might get in slowly at dips.

One stock I did acquire is Apple. Even though it is still below my average buying price, it is very close to breaking even and might be one of the few gems that might make some money for me going forward. Even though I own no apple products, I see everyone around me has them. At tech meetings at UVA, I see half the people carrying iPhones and I seem to be the only one with an HTC Touch Pro (or any WinMo phone for that matter). People will live with poor service form AT&T and no 3G coverage but they still want their iPhones. I went to an iPhone development meeting and it turns out you need a Mac to develop apps for an iPhone! And everybody wants to make apps for iPhones. So indirectly that is a driver for Mac sales.

My hopes are on a recovery of the stock market over the coming years and I switched from a state pension plan to the University’s own retirement plan (about 10% of salary is put in your account and fully vested immediately with no matching requirement from the employee). It costs the University less than the state pension plan (for which the University contributes just over 11% – 5% goes to you, vested in 5 years and the remaining 6.something% goes to the state)

The stock market made a comeback and a few days ago became positive for the year. Even though the jobless rate is expected to rise to 10% by the end of the year and mortgage rates are expected to remain low too, the market has been so badly beaten that some recovery is probably a given.

At the same time America is shooting itself in the foot by delaying immigration even more and making people who are employed (employment based immgration requires that you be emplpoyed obviously) wait a decade or more to get their green cards. In my previous post I pointed out several ways immigration reform could boost employment ant the economy. And it seems that there cannot be a better time than now.

Fewer people want to come to the US now as is evident from the lack of applicants for H1 Visas this year as compared to the last few years.

However instead of moving forward, immigration dates continuously move backward at an alarming rate. In my previous post I posted the dates from the April Visa bulletin. The May bulletin made all EB-3 (skilled worker, jobs that require a bachelors degree) unavaileble until October. The Jun bulletin moved EB-2 (jobs that require a Masters degree or significant experience) back to 2000 for Indians. That means that there are some Indians with advanced degrees who have been waiting for nearly 10 years!

Looking at the trend of visa applications, it seems that there are more than half a million pending applications. It looks like things will get worse before they get better and America probably needs some kind of legislation to help legal employment based immigrants, the guys who pay taxes, spend etc. and in general help the economy.

Maybe I should title this post as “How Immigration Laws are Helping Destroy the Economy” because that is what is happening. Americans don’t have jobs. Employment based immigrants who are here legally have jobs. Many of these people would like to leave their jobs to start businesses or to work for smaller companies. After all small business is what makes America America.

Unfortunately for most of these immigrants, the process of immigration is worse than it is for illegal immigrants. With the long lines and retrogression for Indians and Chinese it is often taking ten years for people to get Green cards. Take the current processing dates from the Visa Bulletin:

What this means is that if you are from India, EB2 (these are people who are working in jobs that require Masters Degrees or higher or significant experience) then they are currently processing applications that are filed on or before 15-Feb 2004. About five years ago.

The worst hit here are Indians in the EB3 category (there are people with jobs requiring Bachelors degrees or higher). USCIS is processing cases filed before 01-NOV 2001. That is about eight years ago.

The date is a cutoff date and it means that you cannot even file for your last stage of immigration if you started after that date

Chinese also face the same problem but not as severly

It takes about two to three years to get to the point where you can file your application. So people have been waiting for 7 – 10 years currently. Also since Oct 2005, the problem has been getting worse each year. This means that most people cannot switch jobs (not even move to different departments in the same company) without restarting all over.

In my other blog, I’ve mentioned several Bills that can help this issue, one would be lifting country the county cap on Employment based immigration. Another is allowing people to file for all stages of their immigration even if the dates are not current.

This would have a significant impact on the American Economy because

1. These highly qualified individuals would switch jobs, get promoted etc. making room for more jobs to open up. Currently many of these people are stuck in jobs that they are overqualified for because they are afraid to switch jobs and often even afraid to get promoted.
2. Many of these people have the desire to start their own businesses or join small buinesses. USCIS is notorious for rejecting immigration applications from small businesses and you are not permitted to work on your own buiness in US without significant issues with Visas.
3. A lot more immigrants would buy houses. I know from constantly hanging out in forums that many immigrants will not risk buying a house until they have a green card because they might be sent home at any time if their company goes bust, they are unemployed for few months or for some other reason because dealing with immigration is such a pain

Inspite of the fact that America is the land of Immigrants, the current state of people who wish to come here legally and are contributing to the economy (spending, taxes etc.) is worse than that of illegal immigrants and their issues are mostly ignored.

It is a common joke amongst us legal immigrants that our American born children will grow to be 21 and sponsor our green cards before we get our own if this trend continues.

The goverment rejected the automaker restructuring plan, asked for GM CEO to resign and better terms with unions. This is exactly what should have been done with banks. Get rid of their lousy management, reduce the ridiculous pay that financial folks get and not just dump money at them.

I’m glad the administration is talking a tough stand this time. Hopefully no more of your and my money and our children’s money gets thrown at problems that shouldn’t be solved. If there is a need, somebody will come forward and fill the need. We don’t require government intervention in everything everywhere unless it is a good plan that we know will work.

Inspite of today’s downturn, it looks like 2009 has the potential to be a positive year for stocks. Fingers crossed.