software: the future "oil?"
This:
It's inevitable that certain things - fabrication, maintenance, testing, upgrades, and other routine knowledge work - will be done overseas. But ... before these Indian programmers have something to [do], that something first must be imagined and invented. And these creations must be explained to customers and marketed to suppliers ... which require aptitudes that are more difficult to outsource - imagination, empathy, and the ability to forge relationships. t seems clear that the white-collar jobs with any lasting potential in the US won't be classically high tech. Instead, they'll be high concept and high touch.
seems to me an exercise in whistling past the graveyard. The assumption seems to be that only Americans have the imagination it'll take to continue to drive software development.
Personally, I don't think we're just shipping jobs overseas, we're shipping a whole industry, lock, stock and barrel. Once we've decimated the ranks of American software developers, what kind of conceit on our part lets us beleive that India won't also take the lead in terms of concept, design and marketing? They will, after all, have a captive market in the US, a country ever-more dependant on software and soon to have scant ability to produce it domestically. We'll have to import it like we do oil. And industry is doing this [i]voluntarily?