By now, you've probably read the NYT's rountable on the
macro effects of outsourcing.
Highlight:The Director of Tuck's Digital Strategies Center calls coding a 'low-value' skill, which sparks some
well-deserved flameage at Slashdot. If coding is a low-value skill, what's a high-value skill? Anything that can't be arbitraged away? That's a facile argument, which ignores the roles of social, human, and intellectual capital, as well as knowledge spillovers in innovation
The whole article reminds me of Tim Oren's post a while back about SV4.0, where the digerati were gloomily searching for the 'next big thing'. I think there is no next big thing. The disruptive acceleration of biotech is at least 3-5 years away; that of nanotech's molecular manufacturing phase is at least 5-7 years away.
The answer is that we're right in the thick of a Big Thing - the Net. The Net is
the driver of outsourcing - and that's why we're not seeing huge profits from it. What we are seeing are huge productivity gains. When these are wrung out, and firms have to generate a new comparative advantage, they'll start innovating again. And the ways that the Net enables innovation are all around us - tons of bubble-era technologies are slowly trickling back into vogue.
Not to mention smart products, wireless, and all the other cool things you can do with cheap, ubiquitous interconnectivity.