This is a thinly veiled marketing pitch, justifying the extra cost of buying from the guy with a team in NYC, rather than the guy with a team in Russia.<p><i>To get it right, we need to not only have a tight feedback loop with you, we want to become you. ... That's hard to do across two oceans.</i><p>No, that's hard to do - full stop. You're not bringing your full 15 (I'm guessing) man development team to your client-site for more than a curtesy visit - and certainly not "to become" your client. That's for your analysts. And why would that be significantly more difficult over an ocean than over a desk?<p><i>It's nearly impossible to do that if we're shipping chunks of an effort in packages halfway across the world.</i><p>Then don't ship "packages". My offshore team work off the exact same Trac-issue-list that the rest of my team does.<p><i>Software can always be built elsewhere, but the basic premise that the early blueprints are 100% dead-on are a fantasy.</i><p>Strawman! "outsourcing=waterfall=bad" vs. "insourcing=agile=good"? No..<p><i>But connectedness alone doesn't lay the groundwork for building great product.</i><p>But somehow you seem to argue that un-connectedness does? Bah.
We can quantify this.<p>Software Estimation by Steve McConnell on page 66 lists many factors from the Cocomo II studies with their relative impact on software development. Multi-site development on average causes things to take 1.56 times as long to develop. How much does that extra time to market cost you? I submit that in a competitive world, often a lot.