QUOTE(thekohser @ Mon 26th March 2007, 6:34am)
It's funny, but so many of my Cheetos-fingered, teenage critics laughed at how much Wikipedia Review was trying to charge clients for something that "they could do themselves for free". On the other hand, several of my clients and many reputable business people who examined the business model often commented, "You should be charging $499, not $49." It's certainly a telling example of how little the average Wikipedian knows about the business world and the value of intellectual capital.
I've got companies that actually can't buy some of our cheaper utility programs officially, because $100 is simply too low to be placed on a corporate purchase order. Amounts like that have to come out of petty cash, which for an individual user is almost unobtainable compared to setting up a PO, which by contrast is just a matter of e-mailing a request to the right person. So they end up having to put it on personal credit cards and "expense it" - and since nobody wants to do that, I've ended up having to
raise prices to increase sales! I've done that twice now.
QUOTE(LamontStormstar @ Mon 26th March 2007, 8:00am)
Wouldn't the underpaid foreigners then go into business for themselves in time?
Most outsourcing firms are actually very strict about that, believe it or not, at least in India. In addition to non-compete agreements, they have reputations to maintain for not doing that very thing, and their in-country competitors are very quick to point fingers when it happens...
That's not to say that people should ever outsource anything, of course. But I suppose it
could be said that outsourcing a function that was never done by domestic workers in the first place is a whole lot better than laying people off in your own community just to save money in the short term.
One thing that does occasionally happen, though (and this is rarely written about) is that in the software development industry, outsourcing firms will buy the rights to failed projects as salvage operations. These then wind up on their websites as entries in long lists of products that unsuspecting US CTO's assume to be internally developed, and their existence is supposed to prove that the company is well-versed in whatever genre the product is - accounting, ERP, document imaging, whatever.
Anything. In fact, very few of those products are original to that company, and none of the original designers are still involved. There's less of that now than there was 5-6 years ago when outsourcing was starting to really take off, but it still happens occasionally.
That's not particularly relevant to this thread, of course... but
this might be, though!