who wants gandelf to start on about outsourcing?

[Lairiodd]

I think you missed the sarcasm Lair

Fair enough, but 99% of time people complain that a company making stuff abroad is "exploiting" the workers there, they are really complaining that they are being underbid, but they can't say that.

[Xest]

Fair enough, but 99% of time people complain that a company making stuff abroad is "exploiting" the workers there, they are really complaining that they are being underbid, but they can't say that.

Frankly if anything, I'd say the workers are exploiting the company - the bosses at these companies don't seem to realise how appalling a service they're getting, probably because they don't experience first hand how bad a service their customers get. It doesn't matter how little they're getting paid, the quality of work they provide simply isn't worth it in my experience. The amount of incompetence I've had to deal with through Dell's and Microsoft's India call centres is second to none - I simply can't understand why Microsoft/Dell would pay anything at all for such incompetent staff.

Probably the biggest winners are those who own the call centres, they make millions of the big companies and frankly give them an atrocious service back, yet the big corps. still fall for it.

[Slayn]

It's certainly true that a lot of big companies are rolling back their outsourcing, having realised that their cost gains are often outweighed by the sales loss when their customers become alienated.

This is quite specific to the 'call-centre' trend, though, which is only one type of outsourcing. There's also a huge volume of 'back-office work' that is outsourced by large companies. Things like simple admin, data entry, accounts etc. Since it's 'back-office', firms worry less about it affecting the public's perception of their goods. And if it's stuff like data entry or software debugging, the language barrier is less likely to be an issue, so long as the workers are technically skilled at what they're doing. Because these things *do* require skills like numeracy/programming, it allows great growth opportunities for countries that are able to educate workers to a sufficient level. India is a particular example of this.

[maxis]

Pedantry inc...

Actually what you are talking about is offshoring (which is a special case of outsourcing)

Outsourcing in general is just where you employ specialist companies to do specific tasks, e.g. rather than employ software developers yourself, you contract another company to perform that function for you. In most cases this is onshore (indeed often on your premises) unless specifically stated otherwise.

[Xest]

Very true Maxis the terms do tend to get rather muddied more than they should I suppose.