Re:

Brad,

I think along the same lines as you do, but let's be honest. If you are in
the business developing enterprise apps then it's closer to factory-line
manufacturing than it is to intellectual pursuit. Which Fortune 100 company
really cares where their next employee intranet portal is written? There's
not much to cranking out shopping cart sites either. There is a good chance
that a good chunk of this work is going offshore. Most likely it's going to
be marketed by an American façade company whose pitch is going to be that
they in fact can control the requirements gathering process and deliver a
quality product at lesser cost. How well that's going to work out remains to
be seen. In the mean time it’s up to the domestic shops to deliver quality
products and take full advantage of the factors they have going for them to
keep their clients or companies happy and keep a leg up against the outside
competition.

If you're in the real product development business then things look at lot
different. You do care a lot about being agile, responding to shifts in the
market and retaining immediate access to you IP. You want to make sure that
you hire developers that will stay with you for a while, not anonymous code
monkeys that you never will have access to again. Offshoring this kind of
work simply does not make sense, you might as well offshore the entire
company.


Christoph

And yes. I've seen too many .coms here in Austin that just deserved to go
under! Most of them had no business sense and/or a viable product. I never
understood how they were getting the money that they were blowing out the
window.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Unmoderated DOTNET job forum [mailto:DOTNET-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Brad Wilson
> Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 9:52 PM
> To: [email protected]
> 
> Mark A. Gregory wrote:
> 
> > In Australia we used to have a clothing and manufacturing industry, in
> > fact during the 50s we were close to being the worlds largest producer
> > of televisions and radios. Then they discovered Asia.
> 
> > Now we are seeing most software opportunities moving to Asia. The big
> > companies state they are doing it for their shareholders.
> 
> Well, I'm sure you realize this, but software development is very
> different
> from manufacturing. One is an intellectual pursuit which requires a
> particular kind of employee, and another is a mechanical one which can be
> done virtually anywhere. I'd be careful trying to draw parallels.
> 
> (Jobs were lost here because of the .COM bust, but let's be honest: most
> of
> those companies deserved to go under.)
> 
> Brad
> 
> --
> Read my web log at http://dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com/