more on software companies of the west...

vmware is a fast growing comapny. it is tripling in revenues every year. it is a platform on which one can run every operating system. this is useful on a dektop surely but even more useful on a server machine since vmware memory overhead is not significant comapred to the actual allocation to the operating systems. and it allows the same istallation to have strengths of linux and m$ server market. a new product called vmotion actually facilitates moving a running server from a server to another. but the minus point is obviously that the work is very technical and apart from the design team which is reasonably unapproachable without a PhD, the work does noit have muchy perspective and the submodules are difficult but very technical.

oracle is of course the industry leader in databases. the subgroup that is hiring is also involved in very good work. specifically it has projects like maintaining concurent distributed transations across processors. again the work is technical and the rewards are not short term and are not really too apparent to the guys making the submodule either.

amazon is also a very ambitious company and is a rage at the stock market. it has really high paying jobs in the IT sector and since they are essentially in a very lucrative paret of IT sector it is a great lace to be right now. long term job satisfaction is not guaranteed though.

google stands out of the crowd. at the moment. It is a company with the best salaries, flattest governance architectures, and tons of very exciting and diverse projects. the only minus point is the sustainability of emoployee enthusiasm. it is hiring at a precocious pace and with unchallenged salaries. all these will creep up to ask profitability questions once they enter a glitch in one of their core competencies or some player divides up their core competency and eats into a few parts of it. after it's ipo the flatness of its architectures is disappearing fast. all in al it is a risk as well as an opportunity.