| Thursday, March 9, 2006 |
18:03 - Just trying to be more like the PC world, Apple?
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/03/09/apple-to-outsource-tech-support-to-india/#comments
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This doesn't sound like great news:
The India Times reported today that Apple is planning to set up a massive tech support center in Bangalore, India its first tech support center outside of Cupertino. The article says that Apple will hire 3,000 tech support workers in India by 2007, with up to half of those to be hired this year.
As many commenters have already noted, not only is this not Apple's first non-Cupertino call center, there is no call center in Cupertino to begin with. (It'd be bordering on criminal to house a fundamentally location-independent phone support cubicle bank on land this expensive.) Apple Support is handled in Texas, Ohio, Canada, and elsewhere.
But not, up till now, in a place where thick accents and poor line quality—the things that have driven companies like Dell to abandon outsourced phone support, and the things that we Mac people used to be able to use as a reason to choose Apple instead of a company that outsourced—are notorious.
You know, I'd been under the impression that the consensus was settling on the computer industry that outsourcing—whether of phone support, security, development, QA, or whatever else—was a bad idea. I thought all the bellwether companies had tried it and found it so lacking in dividends that it was becoming accepted that it's worth every penny to keep your business-critical business in-country. I have friends who have to deal with outsourced development and QA teams; however good the quality of the work might be, some realities of the Earth we live on are simply insurmountable—such as the fact that you can't schedule meetings with people halfway around the world, conference calls have lag time of up to a second as signals have to be reflected around the planet using satellites, and so on. This is frustrating enough in development; but what about when you're talking to customers? That's even worse for your corporate image. What can Apple be thinking?
I was reading Marcus Ranum's Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security the other day (highly recommended), and in an aside he said this:
There's an important corollary to the "Action is Better Than Inaction" dumb idea, and it's that:
"It is often easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart."
Sun Tzu didn't really write that in "The Art of War" but if you tell IT executives that he did, they'll take you much more seriously when you counsel a judicious, thoughtful approach to fielding some new whizzbang. To many of my clients, I have been counselling, "hold off on outsourcing your security for a year or two and then get recommendations and opinions from the bloody, battered survivors - if there are any."
From the sound of the seething from the commenters here, Apple might be lucky if it gets to count itself among those survivors.
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Brian Tiemann
