How long before, the IT outsourcing negatively affects the US

[Fluff]

I was quite annoyed of the hassle of goung through a Dell help line and ending up in deli, 20 minutes to arrange a power supply swap for a laptop, it should have taken 2 minutes!

What will the US companys do if the outsourced staff, take the knowledge, jump ship, and release better products?

They could be digging a hole for themselves in the long term, just to please the books / investors in the short term..

[Joel]

They could be digging a hole for themselves in the long term, just to please the books / investors in the short term..

I couldn't have said it better myself.

joel

[cjolley]

How long?
Oh, three or four years ago.

I can't walk 10 meters from my desk and get a sensible answer to business process questions half the time.
How outsourcing produces reliable results in programming I'll never know.

chuck

[Brian Ellis]

Re: How long before, the IT outsourcing negatively affects the US

Originally posted by Fluff
I was quite annoyed of the hassle of goung through a Dell help line and ending up in deli,

Sure you didn't end up in Dell-i?

What I could say is that cheap-o products get cheap-o support. I had that brought home to me recently with middle-of-the-range HP inkjets and scanners. Perfect and rapid e-mail support for standard problems but the moment that the problem is non-standard, then you maybe better with Epson.

I bought the two items on 27 September. I managed to get the scanner working this week, but only because I pressurised the local importer (a phone call promised in early October from one of their development team never materialised). I still do not have the printer, which had a faulty firmware: it is travelling goodness-knows where at the moment.

Of course, the cheap-o stuff from Dell and HP and most other suppliers is not made in the USA, in any case, but somewhere in Asia. My absent inkjet, for example, was made in Malaysia and its PSU in China, so what have they to lose in intellectual property? There is no way that the US could make this kind of stuff and sell them at the ridiculous prices of today. IOW, the Dell, HP, Compaq, whatever, stuff only has the labels and the case as proprietary. The actual guts may be shared across a number of makes.

[Wombat]

Re: Re: How long before, the IT outsourcing negatively affects the US

Originally posted by Brian Ellis
IOW, the Dell, HP, Compaq, whatever, stuff only has the labels and the case as proprietary. The actual guts may be shared across a number of makes.

Nope, not true. The important stuff, like print heads and whatnot, is all very proprietary.

[The PIT]

Yes the call centre outsourcing can be big problem. Took me a month to find out whether my BT dialup account had been canceled or not. All becuase the nice Indian gentleman forgot to press the right buttons. Luckily I could sought it out by email which seemed to be sorted out by BT in this country.
Since the call centre is regarded as the face of the company it's a bad move. Just to save a few pennies as well.
As these countries take off it'll be interesting to see what happens to the econimic migrant. I wouldn't be surprised that the drift into europe starts reversing.

[GNEP]

But even when the call centres are in your own country the staff can be just as (or more) unhelpful and stupid.

Don't have a problem with it personally. It's creating jobs where they are more needed than here.

[rylan]

Personally I'd rather see our citizens with jobs than shipping every damned thing overseas.

Anyway, it already is negatively effecting US buisnesses. Recently the evil Dell had to reverse its corporate customer IT support trend and bring the support people back to the US, because they were losing a lot of buisness (IT guys got sick of trying to translate and deal with some clueless person in some other country trying to fix a problem with a server).

[orangejulius]

If you buy an Optiplex or Latitude you will not get out-of-US support any longer. Dell got so many complaints from their corporate customers that they're not doing that anymore for those two lines.

[ALBPM]

Yup, Dell already learned that lesson the hard way. Sales dropped and complaints rose.

[Wombat]

Nota bene: Dell did not reduce their Indian staff at all, they just transferred other products over there when they brought the corporate support back. The size of their Indian support staff is going up monotonically as they continue to reduce Stateside support.

[Brian Ellis]

Re: Re: Re: How long before, the IT outsourcing negatively affects the US

Originally posted by Wombat
Nope, not true. The important stuff, like print heads and whatnot, is all very proprietary.

The HP print heads are integral with the cartridges. I have a "French" fax machine which uses HP cartridges, but the mechanics are identical to HP printers.

If you look inside a wide variety of printers, esp. Laser, you will see that the insides of all of them are one of about 5 makes. The cartridges and other details may be different. The most obvious example of this is with CD burners which are so compact that they can't move the buttons around. I have 2 here, a DVD burner and 3 CD-ROMs. Amongst these 6 items, all different models of 5 makes, the drawers are of only 2 types!!! However, the firmware is always different.

My first laser printer, in the 80s, was Siemens, but was absolutely identical to an HPLJII except for the electronics.