Insightful commentary about outsourcing and strategy from an anonymous Valley tech consultant:
"...It was amazing to me that with the economics of this... Companies seem to be saving dollars up-front, but it seems to be stretching out project times. They may miss critical market windows. A lot of these outsourced projects may be under-budget, but they're not on time, and you often don't know what you've wound up with when you're done.
They're amputating critical functions. They're outsourcing core technologies. I'm also concerned about security, in that Companies may some day try to sell into an emerging market only to find they've been beaten to the punch by a derivative of their own outsourced code".
These things are ignored by beancounters, because they want to sell outsourcing, and also because it's difficult to assign costs to complex, interdependent factors - especially when your model is a simple spreadsheet.
The quote's from here.