[ale] Indian outsourcing

[Adam Levenstein]

--- Stuffed Crust <pizza at shaftnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Protectionism is even worse than offshoring.  And while I agree with
> you
> in that I think it'll sort itself out and (eventually) reverse, I
> think
> it'll get a lot worse before it gets better. 

I think it's already starting to slow down, if not turn around
completely. Dell's had to pull back. IBM is still offshoring, but
they've scaled it down.
 
> (and there will probably be an enron-esque scandal or three thrown in
> 
>  for good measure)

Eh. I think Enrons will be with us as long as we have capitalism. These
days, accounting requires more "creative thinking" than
number-crunching. (Sometimes I half-joke that nobody's made a dime in
30 years, they just tweak the numbers to pretend that they have.)

> And for the record, my job largely depends on being the beneficiary
> of
> outsourcing, and IP licensing.

IP licensing? Yuk! You ought to be more ashamed of that than the
outsourcing thing. :)

> We simply have no chance in hell of competing on price.  And nearly
> impossible to compete on anything else (price, flexibility, same time
> zone), given that the prima rosa for offshoring to begin with is that
> it
> appears cheaper. 
>
> Longer term, businesses will learn that it really doesn't work out
> all
> that well, either monetarily or indirectly, because making the
> inevitable changes or developing new products will cost that much
> more
> later.

It's a quality thing. Language barriers + time zone issues (ever have a
3 a.m. staff meeting?) + cultural differences + increased QA problems =
lower quality. Which will hurt in the long term. But the thing with IT
is that "long term" can be on the order of several weeks; what took
years to observe in the "old" economy can be seen to happen almost in
minutes in the IT economy.

>  That will eventually trickle down into the MBA mills who will
> finally stop cranking out hordes of MBAs who think
> outsourcing/offshoring is the answer to everything.

It's a management fad, right up there with "downsizing." What happened
with the "downsizing" boom of the early 90s? Turned out management
wasn't real good at figuring out how to streamline business processes,
after all. Over time they wound up having to hire people to fill in the
gaps, to the point where numbers-wise they were back where they
started.

Offshoring will last a couple years, then fizzle. The US still
manufactures cars, IT work will still be done here.

Adam


=====
-----------------------------------------------------------
Adam Levenstein                          cleon42 at yahoo.com
http://www.geekpins.com

All your badgers are belong to us.

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