What does Outsourcing Really Do?

Another interesting outsourcing focused piece - Outsourcing, Schmoutsourcing! Out Is Over, from the author of "The World is Flat", Thomas Friedman.
In this piece he focuses on the increased possibilities due to globalization. Things we take for granted, like going online and buying something which is delivered to us in 2 days. Do we ever give a thought as to where the product is made, where the company whom you are buying the product from is based, who is the distributor who enables you to have the product in 2 days?
The entire process is completely transparent to the end user. That is the power of technology combined with the global economy.
Another very important point he ends with in the article, is the reduction of world poverty. People inherently are not altruistic. People in developed nations are not interested in eradicating world poverty at the cost of their comforts (for which they have worked long and hard for) or promoting dependent laziness(as has been the case with many welfare states.)
What globalization provides is an opportunity for the less developed nations to catch up. The money is not being provided to them for free. There is a price - its called hard work.
The article is available to Times Select subscribers but I am taking the liberty to quote from it.
"A short time later I was interviewing Katie Jacobs Stanton, a senior product manager at Google, and Krishna Bharat, founder of Google's India lab. They told me that Google had just launched Google Finance, but what was interesting was that Google Finance was entirely conceived by the Google team in India and then Google engineers from around the world fed into that team — rather than the project's being driven by Google headquarters in Silicon Valley...

If more countries can get just a few basic things right — enough telecom and bandwidth so their people can get connected; steadily improving education; decent, corruption-free economic governance; and the rule of law — and we can find more sources of clean energy, there is every reason for optimism that we could see even faster global growth in this century, with many more people lifted out of poverty. "

Tariq Akbar