Charles Simonyi: Why Not to Worry About Outsourcing

David Schatsky | July 01, 2004, 01:55 PM

Last night I was thrilled to meet Charles Simonyi, the legendary computing pioneer and original architect and programmer of Microsoft Word and Excel, who was at Microsoft from 1981 through 2002. Simonyi was in New York to receive a Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.

In his address to the group Simonyi talked a bit about offshore outsourcing, a principal part of Infosys's business and a controversial topic, saying that we should not be concerned about outsourcing. Something suitable for outsourcing is destined for obsolesence anyway, he maintains. He recalled the big decision at Microsoft in the 1980s to outsource the production of floppy disks. At the time, it seemed momentus. Today, no one publishes software on floppy disks.

Call centers are the ripest outsourcing category today but Simonyi predicted that demand for that service will decline as self-service improves and products get better and provoke fewer service incidents.

While that conclusion is debatable, he connected this to the mission of his present company, Intentional Software. The company's mission is to radically improve the quality of software by providing a systematic means for capturing the user requirements and domain knowledge that are the DNA of any custom software project. Don't worry about offshore outsourcing of development, Simonyi says, soon development will go the way of the floppy.

I'm eager to see where he takes this mission.