>My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. I'm consulting for a Fortune 500 that has used a

>My conclusion from observing over the years is that companies with failed business models go offshore to die. I'm consulting for a Fortune 500 that has used a particular 3rd party system for a significant business function for the past decade. Since the vendor seems incapable of debugging its own system, I ended up reverse engineering parts of it to identify the bug. Then, a call was scheduled between me, the Fortune 500's application support folks, and the vendor's application support folks. The vendor's customer service supervisor and I were the only two people on the call who were not located in India. An analysis of the application's architecture is a data point in support of your claim. The oldest pieces of the application seem to have some thought behind them although the implementation is significantly outdated. However, the vendor's off-shored web-ification of the application is a cut & paste spaghetti disaster (as easily observed in nearly 4K JSPs, each with one-off authentication code). This company was recently sold to another software vendor that seems to collect has-been cash cows, so it's clearly a couple steps from the graveyard.