President-elect Obama has announced "a bold initiative to save or create 2.5 million jobs in the next two years". (source: www.change.gov) Hopefully he (and his staff) will examine the reasons why jobs in the USA are lost to other countries. One of the leading reasons is that costs are just too high in the USA. Contributing to that is not only the cost of labor but the total cost of the product which includes all costs of a business. Companies today spend a TREMENDOUS amount of money on software and other support process. By tackling those costs
and applying such modern techniques as Agile Programming, utilizing Open Source and the power of "community" a companies total cost can be reduced. This would lead not only to better processes since the software would exactly support the business but also a lower total cost.
Some might say that it is only a fraction of total cost since labor is a high percentage. The actual savings from having streamlined software tools (not big, bulky, hard to configure, expensive "off the shelf" software) and the impact on speeding up process improvements is unknown. My opinion is that it would be a positive exponential impact on the speed of innovation. That makes it worthwhile.
Whoever is selected as the USA's CTO should have an Open Source Summit. Properly executed it could become the USA's competitive advantage.
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