Will be interesting to see how this pans out
I've seen plenty of examples where management of companes got the outsourcing bug, decided to believe overblown sales patter and ended up paying way over the cost of in-house development for shoddy products and then being held to ransom for "support" for long afterwards.
More relevantly I remember working at [Large Financial Institution] on a major server upgrade costing tens of millions. The hardware was supplied by [Major Server Vendor] who had closed down its' USA manufacturing facility that made [vital storage component] and opened up a facility in an Eastern European country with much lower salaries and much less experience of running this sort of facility. Within three months the many [vital storage components] started to fail within days of each other, resulting in mass panic from [major server vendor], private jets with engineers carrying USA made components over to install, and newly built Eastern European facility being closed and old USA plant reopened, possibly with recently laid off staff being offered their old jobs back after having pocketed a big redundancy cheque.
Could this happen again in this case?
The Chinese developers may be cheaper right now, saving on your monthly salary bill. But VMWare have just sent many years of knowledge and experience that they paid for out of the door. And that really matters : they know the products, code, company standards (formal and informal) and culture inside out. This will have to be learnt all over again by the newbies and it's going to be dificult and costly if the dev team is thousands of miles away. How will quality control be done? Try doing it across time zones yourself one day, I can tell you from experience that it becomes enormously painful and slow. I could go on and on with examples of why this is a bad idea in practice....
I think at the most minimal, the short term gains from salary savings are going to be overshadowed by the long term cost of getting such a radical change bedded in and working smoothly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
