Hi Terry,

>My sense is that outsourced work is tedious, mostly data maintenance stuff. Sure it's cheap - but the customer has to do all the leg work - prototype, specifications -,
>

I don't know about that. A competitor to my last employer outsourced an ASP.NET interface for their flagship product to Indian developers. Supposedly, the Indian company was at CMM Level 5. That intimidated me a little bit. I read an article in Software Development magazine a while back discussing the issue. Apparently, CMM is the way a lot of these companies operate, since it is so documentation heavy. That helps with the communication barrier, but it also pumps up the hours billed, although it's probably still cheaper than hiring local. In the end, the US company gets exactly what was documented, and perhaps not what they need. That was the gist of the article anyway. Of course, it was written by an American developer, so some bias might be involved. <g>