Outsourcing, or, This Time It Will Work For Sure!

Oh man, those first four hundred bites of dirt were not so good. Maybe the next one will be better.

- Stinkoman

I just got back from meeting with a buddy who was telling me how his organization is getting ready to outsource tens of thousands of internal email accounts to Google ... or maybe MSN, they haven't decided yet. We spent a fair amount of time and beer discussing why this is a bad idea, mainly because of privacy, accountability, control, and responsiveness. But it doesn't matter. The people making the decision are blinded by the bottom line and can't perceive the hidden costs.

It occurred to me that this whole "Web 2.0 software as a service" outsourcing craze is remarkably similar to the labor outsourcing craze that hit during the last decade. The people holding the purse strings so desperately wanted to assume that they could outsource their unskilled labor and everything would continue to work exactly as it did in house... they'd just pay less. It's unskilled labor, what difference does it make who does it, right? They should know better, there's no free lunch! When you outsource, you're sacrificing layers of control and adding layers of complexity. And because of that, sometimes the end result is toy trains painted with lead.

Programming, the creation of new software, has already been through this. Now with Web 2.0, technology infrastructure is next on the auction block. Internal corporate email isn't a profit center, so let's outsource it! But the result is going to be the same.

Does it make a difference that the outsourcing is going to be domestic this time? No, not really. In the Internet world of SMTP hops and server logs, the number of hops, and the number of administrative layers, matters more than geography.