East Europe to beat India as BPO hub

Your Special Friend

No, it won't. Clueless people repeat this damn fallacy so often that gullible managers are sucked into it. Outsourcing for English-speaking countries has just about hit saturation, and in any case in India we're losing our share of the outsourcing biz to cheaper countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh. The big growth these days is in outsourcing for *non-English-speaking countries* like e.g. France, Germany and Japan. Thus about the only part of India that's really seeing big gains is in Tamil Nadu in the south, where they can speak French.

China has a lot of people who know Japanese and German, and so they're getting some of the offshoring jobs that come from Japan, Germany and Austria for example-- a big slice of the economic pie that we in India are missing out on b-c we're too darn focused on English as the language taught in schools and haven't diversified to other foreign languages enough. Anyone who starts hawking English as an elective over other languages on the basis of "getting more outsourcing biz" is a fool-- the business for English has maxed out, and if India (and other countries for that matter) want to make gains in the outsourcing sector, they need to focus less on English and more on languages like Japanese, German, Portuguese, French and Spanish where the growth in IT, customer service and back-office applications is now becoming pretty strong and consistent.

Vijay