TinkerX

I got a good "ping" from the blog "Adam Smith, Esq.," which you should check out on a regular basis, as it is smartly written and often wry. I like my marketing on wry. Toasted.

A "ping," for those of you who don’t write blogs, is when another blogger writes a post, and includes a link back to a post on your blog. This link is called a "trackback ping" or just "ping" for short. So Bruce MacEwen wrote a post, and pinged one of my earlier posts.

Well, now I’m pinging the post of his that pinged my post. 

Go read his post, linked above, and then come back here and read my response, below. Go ahead. I’ll wait…

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Welcome back.

Bruce:

I’m flattered to be pinged under "pretty" rather than "much" or "everyone," but I have to disagree with you that "the only truly new variant in the long history of outsourcing is the ability to ‘fragment complex processes into their components…it is the granularity of the effort that can be outsourced.’

Throughout the history of business, the ability to compete successfully has often required that companies go to where the market is, or at least be able to take their products, services, workers or marketing into some geographic proximity of their competitors’ products, services, workers or marketing. Originally, this meant opening an actual by-God store across the street from your competitor. You know; "location, location, location." When mail-order retail came along (and "The Model-T Ford made the trouble, made the people want to go, want to git, want to git, want to git-up and go!"), that removed a certain barrier to place, but you still needed to get product to the place, and needed a place to make the product, etc., etc.

We’re in the Age of Content now, though [Blantant plug for an old article of mine here].  More and more of what we value doesn’t require a "place." It’s not that "there’s no there there," but the "there there" can be anywhere.

The fact that content started getting digitized about the same time that the Berlin Wall fell and communism pretty much went ker-schploomp and the world got connected is one of Friedman’s main points; it’s a big convergence, and means that the 2.5 billion people living in formerly non-capitalist countries are suddenly not only in a brave, new, free market world… but a world where there are very recently developed tools that allow for collaboration over great distances.

Complex collaboration processes on complex knowledge work wasn’t possible AT ALL 50 years ago. Pre-computer, we didn’t do that stuff. Complex collaboration across great distances wasn’t possible until computers became connected just over the past 20 years. And that was usually on an intra-company, standalone system scale. Complex, inter-company and company/vendor/customer collaboration only became possible in the last 10 years due to web and interoperability standards. So that is, in fact, a very new element added to the outsourcing mix. Enabling your outsourced partners to interact with you at the same logistical level as your daily partners, customers, vendors and employees. Very new.

And, at some point, a difference in measure also becomes a difference in kind. A few mega-corps and very big companies could certainly afford to set up outsourced solutions in the past. Sure. We can think of the Spanish conquest of South America as the original "ousourcing" program, too. But the scale to which China, India, Russia and the Eastern European nations are involved in outsourcing makes it "new," too. Airplanes had been around for 40 years before regular intercontinental passenger and goods service dramatically changed the face of American business, making possible new models that have generated trillions of dollars in revenue.

Law firms may not be as dramatically affected by outsourcing as other industries, since law can’t "officially" be practiced from outside the country. But their clients will be affected. And the smart firms will, as Bruce says, do new things that they’ve never been able to do before.

It is a great time to be alive. And it’s a great time for more people in more places. I smile all day long.