Outsourcing, in the sense of shipping off high-tech jobs from tech support to software development, doesn’t seem to get as much mention in the news these days. Perhaps it’s because it isn’t perceived as being as big a threat as it used to be. NoJobsForIndia.com looks as though it hasn’t been updated in some time, and typing YourJobIsGoingToIndia.com into your browser’s address bar will take you to a discussion forum on speed bag training.
(There’s a carpetbagger-to-speedbagger joke in there somewhere…)
It may turn out that the real outsourcing challenge that developers have to face isn’t coming from corporations looking to cut costs, but younger internet users, just doing what they’re doing. They’ve been steadily outsourcing desktop jobs to web apps.
Consider this blog entry by Rick “The Post Money Value” Segal. Most of the entry is about how the famous “Cancel or Allow?” Macintosh ad helped him figure out why the Vista-equipped laptop that he’d just bought for his daughter didn’t seem to work. That’s interesting, but what really got me thinking was his postscript:
[Bonus observation] I asked about back ups. Naah. I asked if she had anything on the old one I needed to recover. Naah, all online between Hotmail, writely, facebook, flickr, and myspace. 19 years of age, folks. In University and basically requires no software, no fancy applications. Worth thinking about.
This has got me thinking: What university student activities haven’t yet been converted into or augmented by an online application?