Net Results: H-1B visas are in the news again in Silicon Valley - but not for the usual reasons.

The visas allow highly-skilled foreign workers to take jobs with American companies for up to six years. They are the de facto work permit in the Valley: an extraordinary 39 per cent of all H-1Bs issued in 2003 went to workers in the computing and information technology sectors. Over 600,000 have been handed out since 2000. Irish IT workers in the US know them well.

What makes something as innocuous as a work visa controversial? Well, that all depends on where you sit. If you run a technology company, you're likely to say that they enable you to hire in the skilled workers that cannot be found in the indigenous population, given the low numbers graduating with computing, science and engineering degrees in the US.

You'll add that hiring such workers allows labour to remain in the country rather than being outsourced abroad, with the tax benefits going to the US, not a foreign country.

If you are an American technology worker, you likely see H-1Bs differently. You might feel they essentially offshore work because the jobs go to foreign workers. You probably feel they are a cheap way for companies to hire temporary labour, with no long-term health, pension or other benefit costs.

Instead of paying to help "upskill" costlier and older employees with more seniority, companies can just hire in short-term help at entry-level salaries.

If you are a worker or immigrant rights advocate, you're likely to feel that the visas can all too easily allow foreign workers to be exploited. Many earn below what an equivalent American worker would earn, you'd say, with workers seen as cheap, disposable labour.

This year, all 65,000 H-1Bs allocated for the 2004-2005 fiscal year were snapped up on the first day they were available (back on October 1st, the start of the fiscal year). After discussion and more controversy, Congress decided to allocate an additional 20,000 visas.

But months later, only about 8,000 of those have been applied for. This has caused many on all sides of the H-1B debate to scratch their heads. What has changed in those months? Some feel that demand for foreign workers is now flagging. Are companies hiring more Americans? Or are they moving more work offshore? Or perhaps getting more work out of existing employees? Whatever the case, the situation is a bit embarrassing for those in industry and politics, who argued that these extra visas were sorely needed.

Another curious feature of Valley life at the moment is the effect the current penchant for mergers and acquisitions is having on the commercial real estate market. This is a market that, in terms of occupancy, has been in decline or flat for much of the period since the post-2000 slowdown in the tech sector.

In 1999, companies struggled to find space from San Francisco down to San Jose. Now, 22 per cent of all commercial buildings are unoccupied, a slight improvement on the 25 per cent empty around 2001.

In the San Jose Mercury-News this week, Philip Mahony, a commercial real estate broker, said the M&A trend was a "one-two punch" for the property market. "One, you are eliminating potentially rapidly growing smaller companies, and two, you are putting a lot of people on the street vis-à-vis these mergers." Big companies in acquisition mode, such as Cisco, Google and Oracle, have lots of cubicle space to absorb employee add-ons, so they are generally not acquiring more property to house them. Meanwhile, the smaller companies vacate their old premises, typically freeing up about 30,000 square feet of rental space.

But it is not all gloom for the poor estate agents. Some of that commercial space is being turned over to developers to create the kind of property always in demand here despite downturns - homes. Selling those in future years will keep the agents' pockets nicely lined in a country where the buying and selling agents on a property each earn 3 per cent of the selling price as their cut of the transaction.

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Here's how not to run your WiFi hotspot business - make it impossible for customers to get online without installing special software. The obvious and preferred method, and the one I had always experienced before, is to enable anyone to connect to the service gateway and open a browser, at which point they are transferred to the provider's log-in page where they can either pay for short-term use, or log in as an existing subscriber.

Waiting for a connecting flight at Chicago's O'Hare airport last weekend and with five hours to kill, I popped open my laptop only to find that T-Mobile, the hotspot provider, expects you to install their software first.

They did provide a mini-CD with the software in a handy brochure (if you could find one), but a mini-CD will not work on a slot-loading CD/DVD drive like I have. And I wasn't all that sure I wanted to install more stuff onto my laptop anyway. I just wanted to use the WiFi network, for which I would happily have paid my sponduliks over to T-Mobile.

I wonder how many potential short-term but well-paying customers they lose daily due to this inanity.

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