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>Another aside - I see why it is attractive to companies to outsource develpment and services. Of course, the biggest problem is the language barrier. See Dell for recent difficulties in outsourcing their customer service and sales. I personally know 3 people who decided against purchasing a system from Dell because they couldn't get the saleperson to understand what they needed. If it's that difficult to purchase a system, imagine how tough it will be when you actually need technical support! Of course I think that Dell's corporate sales are the larger portion of their business and I just read that they will be keeping the call centers for that part of the service/sales in North America.

Hi Renoir,

Personally I can't 'see' why it is attractive to companies to outsource development and services.

I **CAN** 'see' that it looks very attractive from a costs-of-services point of view, but there's a whole lot more invloved that just the apparent costs of services.
Your DELL examples are a small part of it but does show the impact where the rubber meets the road. I wonder how much DELL has sunk already in unforeseen costs and how much they yet have to spend, and all for selling less than what they could be selling.

Now take actual DEVELOPMENT (your example is really 'service')... people have already mentioned the language 'barrier'. To me it is true that the foreign workers/managers read/speak English bettter than most of us in 99% of cases BUT that is actually LESS HELPFUL than it is positive. These people will read something and take it LITERALLY and deliver accordingly and it will NOT be what the commissioner felt he ordered. There are way too many implications and assumptions in the way WE use English in day-to-day work INCLUDING specifications, objectives, etc. Spend a day or so interpreting literally things you hear around you and the things you say and I think you'll catch what I mean, and DraganN does a good job of periodically bringing some of the more hilarious ones to our collective attention.

Frankly, the "BOTTOM LINE" is said to be what motivates this outsourcing but in fact it is a phoney "bottom line' - next quarter's or next year's (as in: 'yes, we've had a bad year but that will improve dramatically when we implement our outsourcing plan early next FY and we'll see profits rise to never before seen levels for the year'. Yea, right!
The real 'bottom line' has to INCLUDE more sales by constantly IMPROVING product and not by the magic of exploiting someone else's unfortunate situation for possible (but largely unrealized) short term gains. This has NOTHING to do with IMPROVING the PRODUCT but only with lowering costs. How does that make any product better???

One improves one's product (in the development business that is) by having motivated staff who are intimate with the product and its usage and who yearn to deliver better functionality to real end users. Staff loyalty is an imperative in achieving this and that includes close cohesion between designers and developers and testers and documenters. Keeping design 'local' while outsourcing the other factors to some far away place where English is differently understood is a recipe for unanticipated results and increased costs and possibly even failure.

But "LOYALTY" has been being thrown overboard at a record pace and it is virtually always the COMPANY that makes the first move. Many, like insurance companies, are also doing it outright to customers too!!! Some bean-counters devise a spread-sheet that shows predicted results by dumping group XXX and they simply do not renew policies for group XXX. No matter that the persons dumped may have been with the company for 20 yearsd and never had a claim (or had a small $300 claim this year after 20 years of no claims).
Business has really lost it's common sense. Instead of focusing on making customers happy and getting return business they now focus on cutting costs and have the mistaken belief that customers will not suffer during such processes. And if they CAUSE the loss of some group of customers, well, they just don't fit the new business model.
Except when companies are in financial trouble such practises are bound to put them into financial trouble.

There is positively NO CONCERN for any social upheaval cause by their new-found "models" and in fact they EXPECT that any staff will happily train their outsource replacement. There's common sense for you!

regards
Jim