Will I be next?

Eileen, you just don't get it.

Since when did the first world start thinking that the third world can successfully provide quality IT work when the people in those countries cannot even provide clean water to their own people?

Outsourcing is nothing more than paid-for media hype designed to take what the first world has created. After all if those workers in outsourcing locations were so fabulous, why didn't Silicon Valley spring up there? Answer: they can't do the work.

IT is the most intensely competitve industry on earth. The Japanese tried to crack software 10 years ago and failed. And the Japanese rarely fail at anything they try. If they could not do it, then why does anyone think anyone else can?

All outsourcing is doing is killing off good companies by sending work to incapable countries who take the pay but produce nothing. That is why Silicon Valley is a ghost town.

As the 90s boom showed, it is GOOD for an economy if workers are paid high wages because it raises spending and it encourages people to work harder. Slashing wages to the floor hurts companies, rather than helping them. Why? For one thing laying off workers and replacing them with cheap unskilled labor creates morale problems which lowers the quality of all work. Secondly, it is not in the interest of a good economy to pay workers third world wages because it means people have less to spend. No spending, no business, no business, no profits.

IT businesses are not some supermarket chessboard on which human resources can be shuffled around while the numbers on the P&L statement go up and down. IT is not and never will be a cost-cutting business. Companies need to forget about slashing costs and focus again on innovation. Companies like Apple who continue to innovate are thriving - as the iPod demonstrates. And by the way, they don't outsource their engineering work either.

IT can ONLY thrive in an environment where a large number of extreme-skilled workers are well paid and therefore happy and productive. IT products take time and craftsmanship to get right. They are not some can of soup that gets stocked on a supermarket shelve, although today's IT executives seem to think they are.

The lesson from outsourcing is simple: if you want a strong IT economy, you have to pay highly skilled workers top dollar for their talent. Since when did talent become a cheap commodity? And in IT, at least in software, that talent still resides in American workers. The proof is in the results: seven years of outsourcing has been a disaster for both workers and IT companies alike.

Corporations somehow seem to believe that they can get 90s-level activity by throwing away the very workers who built the 90s IT industry. Everyone else today are simply "Me-too" wannabes.

In addition, name one major commercial name brand or software package that has come out of an Indian, Chinese, or Singaporean company? There are none.

The fact is, software is an art - and as the Japanese discovered it is a uniquely American art. Silicon Valley sprung up in America because of American workers, not because of some magical geographical location.

The extreme high quality demanded in IT requires the best workers in the world. And in software, that still remains Americans. Better workers cost more. You can't have it both ways. You can't pay for a Volkswagen and get a Porsche. If you want a Porsche, you have to pay Porsche's prices.

Corporations are kidding themselves if they think they can get quality IT work done for nothing. Corporations seem to think they are somehow special and immune to paying rates that the market demands.

In the end, they will have to because the market demands the highest quality products, which right now outosurcing nations in the third world cannot provide.

If we want IT to boom again, stop the cost-cutting and focus on value creation - and put American workers back to work.