Best oursourcing location?

On Plaxo, a networking website, someone started a poll that was issued to answer the question: which region is the best one for offshore IT projects? Besides this being a fairly subjective question, none of the multi-choiced answers matched my opinion. The list lacked The Netherlands.

You will find the poll at: http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/events/show/39328239. And since the poll’s author requested comments, I couldn’t help leaving some.

Although there’s certainly a lot of repetitive work that can be outsourced, from my area of expertise, software development, I doubt that this will lead to the best results. Software development is creative work and benefits from close cooperation between customer en developers. I still think that software development can best be done at the customer – not 5.000 miles away, no matter how cheap or high qualified people seem to be elsewhere on the planet. So, if my customer is in the Netherlands, the best outsourcing location will be the Netherlands. The same goes for Belgium, the UK, Sweden, India, South Africa, Australia, etc.