Best Way to layoff employees

Media is flooded with reports about the imminent layoffs at Satyam and how management of TechMahindra and Satyam are planning to layoff 5000/10000/18000 employees from Satyam, depending upon who is the source of news or which media is publishing the news. Whether there has been any layoff or not at Satyam, at least one thing has been constant for several month is that there are imminent layoffs. What this has done is created fear in the minds of Satyam employees. And they have started to look for jobs outside on their own. Employees, who were not very serious to change job at this time, are now seriously in the market. The constant news of layoff have made these employees creative enough to find ways to get new jobs at any cost.
How this has helped the management at Satyam is that without them having to layoff employees company's employee strengh has come down significantly. What else would managment ask for when their goal is being achieved without them having to worry about consequences of laying off.
I wonder if the constant media coverage of layoff was a well tought out strategy of management. Whatever it was it was good. As neither employees had to go through the anogy of being laidoff not management had to draw any flak.

Emerging IT hotspots in world and competition to Indian IT

A lot is being made out of Chinese threat to Indian IT industry and also threat from other emerging cheap IT labour markets like Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic), Latin America (Brazil, Argentina), China, East Asian Countries (Malaysia, Philippines), Russia, etc. But I don’t think any threat from any of these countries at least in next 10 years.
The reason why I think so is because the Outsourcing industry in the world is flourishing because of following three reasons:

• Cheap IT/ Engineering labour,
• English speaking skills and
• Easy and quick Scalability.

All of these three skills or differentiators are equally important for a country to be a real outsourcer and a real threat to India. Because if you have engineers and they are not cheap no point (case is Russia), or you have cheap engineers and also in abundance but no English (China) no point and you have English speaking engineers but not in abundance (Latin America, East Europe and East Asia) then again no point. And all these three above criteria are satisfied by India only.
A lot is being made of China that China will be able to teach English skills to all its engineers in no time and it'll be a threat. But teaching English is no child's play, it take years to be comfortable wit it. The biggest Chinese IT outsourcing company's turnover is not more than $300m in 2006 and that is no match for TCS and Infosys of India. Also most of Chinese companies’ work is domestic.
Another thing IT project management skills (5+ year experience) are costly in China than in India. So the so-called cost advantage of China over India is just a mirage not reality. Also China mainly caters to Japanese market because Dalian area in China provides Japanese speaking resources. There is hardly any work being done for non-Asian market in China. Similarly other countries like Russia, Brazil, Philippines, etc. can not provide scalability which is required in any service industry. Outsourcing jobs requires huge numbers of engineers which are not available in these countries.But all these countries can be very good partners for Indian companies. Indians can utilise these countries by setting their operations in these countries and can tap their local market. So I feel there are more opportunities for Indian IT companies in these countries then threats. Like Indian can open centre in Russia for high end IT work and product development work because of the excellent talent there. Latin America and Eastern Europe could be used to cater for non-English clients. China and Eastern Asia can be used for servicing local and Japanese market. So emergence of these new hotspots should excite India rather intimidate.

Rising ruppee and experienced IT guys

Indin IT companies had been growning at more than 35% y-o-y for many many years now but now that growth seemed to be slowing down considerably. There are many reason for this slow down. Rise of ruppee against the dollar is one of them.
With ruppee rising against dollar significantly in the last year and no slowing down in sight for this ascent in near future the IT compnies are hard pressed to maintain their margins and past growth. They have to look for ways to maintain margins.
One of the way being followed is to hire more and more freshers and take less of experienced guys to work on projects. There was time when all would be experienced guys on all projects in IT companies but now they are putting freshers and one experienced person for a team of 4-5 freshers. Freshers are given some initial training and are expected to work and experienced guy is expected to enforce quality on the deliverables. This way compnies are saving a huge amount by paying pittance to freshers in comparison to experienced guys. When it comes to internal appraisal /increment, not-so-freshers-now are given better increment than experienced, because if given same absolute amount, for a less experienced guy it is better increment than an experienced guy. That means company is saying indirectly to experienced guys that you are not as important as the guys next to you.
This means experienced guys have to work doubly hard to keep themselves relevant. It's not only IT skills which will be enough but also management skill, leadership skills will be required.