[kikibobo69]

This post misses the key point about working for one of these big outsourcing companies: there is no technical career path. The only way to advance in a company like Wipro (the one I have the most experience with) is to become management. This leads to a very unhealthy dynamic, and I don't see how these companies can remain competitive over time. Without an equal investment in ensuring that they have some technical skills to bring to the table, they will never been much more than a cheap place to outsource your testing or running a complicated build environment. I'm amazed they can't see that.

[braindead_in]

There has been an ongoing debate in the industry about the services vs the product approach. Services have been big success story whereas there has been no big product success yet. The services people highlight that fact and hype it up. It leads you believe that there is no future for product development companies in India, which really is not true. The services market has saturated and people are starting to look at product driven companies now. You'll hardly find any startups in services business these days. It will take some time to move on from the services mindset, but it's starting to happen.

[wslh]

The issue is that it's easy to start a service company and have a positive cashflow than to sell a product.

I recommend Michael Cusumano's work on hybrid models: http://web.mit.edu/cusumano/www/