No, this is not about the rumored Microsoft ad campaign around Vista. But it is time to revisit Tom Friedman's 2005 bestseller about flatness. And the fact that several Indian outsourcers used the favorable mentions in the book to significant advantage.
3 years later, IBM, Accenture and now HP with EDS have regained mindshare, if not marketshare. And have a few years lead with labor pools away from the wage inflation and staff turnover and traffic in Bangalore - in Bucharest, Beijing and Buenos Aires. The dollar weakening has hurt most of the Indian firms. Few of them used their now disappearing stratospheric market valuation to make significant acquisitions. Their traditional reluctance to make large capital investments has slowed their impact in infrastructure outsourcing. And looked at from the lens of new price points in SaaS and cloud computing models, the vendors I coined as SWITCH have become the new expensive "Big 6".
Over the last 2 decades, Indian vendors have shown the ability to morph every few years. Time for the cat to use up another of its lives. Because while the sky is not falling, the world is not flat either.
