My impression is that early outsourcing did work but it worked because the first outsourcing in India companies were founded and staffed by an elite fraction of

My impression is that early outsourcing did work but it worked because the first outsourcing in India companies were founded and staffed by an elite fraction of Indian developers who, for the money, were in many cases sufficiently better that the in house counterparts to overcome the very significant problems of remote development. Capitalism works and that huge salary differential has eroded to the point where this is no longer the case. You can no longer get a Phd to work on your in house CRM system for $20 an hour. Outsourcing companies tried to scale past this talent imperative through heavy process focus but this of course only works for very well understood problems of which there are few in the software world.