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I agree with most of what these articles say, but it's pretty "first order" rudimentary information and there are few takeaways that I can see.

I will explain a bit more why I can't get into these types of articles so much.

Every time someone states "why" software development is a natural for offshoring and why it is inevitable that it was to be offshored, it never really adds up for me.

Crap is crap. Most people, and most meal ticket oriented so called programmers, can't develop software to save their lives. The output of offshore operations is usually crap, or is very simplistic stuff. By my own standards, only a close by, highly skilled resource is able to produce quality software product.

But, defying my intuition, a lot of that work has moved offshore. I didn't call it, and few other did, either.

The "top jobs" article says this:

A new trend which became obvious in ~1998 is for entry level "knowledge worker" jobs such as programming, customer service, tech support, and accounting to be moved to countries with English speaking lower cost workers. This trend is just getting started and it could hollow out the English speaking economies of North America and Europe.

A large portion of programming, tech support, data entry, and accounting jobs can be handled remotely from countries such as India where they speak perfectly polite Queen's English, and where they have excellent educational systems. This puts many lucrative jobs at risk.

I'm sorry, but it was never "obvious" to me that real software development had been suitable for offshoring. And I have yet to witness the greatness of Indian English communication abilities or educational systems.

So articles like this come off as rationalizations of what has come before, which nobody really predicted all that well.

So I think the crystal ball is cracked here. Or at least very cloudy. I don't think anyone has a handle on what is to come.

I do think that most "movement" of jobs due to labor cost arbitrage between nations has pretty thoroughly played out. 10 years ago the cheapness of a (usually inferior, but propped up by PR and marcomm) offshore developer was "startling." Now it's well known, and is already figured into pricing of services. I think offshoring is just what is done now when there is an advantage to be gained. IE, it's now just another optimizable business process, like advertising or distribution. It's not some holy grail that is sweeping the economy. It's "done swept."

I think the real action now will be in technological shifts and the effects of currency instabilities on world economics. I am very skeptical of any article that asserts that there is much more that offshoring has to "show" us. It's a known quantity. It wasn't in 1998.

And I wonder if the limits have already been reached or exceeded on offshoring. At some point someone needs some work to get done, and the "overseas knuckleheads overseen by a few bright locals" model of offshoring is very cumbersome compared to just hiring a few good people who are local and working with them directly.