I'm inclined to agree, if only because of my experience with outsourced call centers. I think we will see some jobs boomerang, especially the service centers. You can teach a young Indian to speak English well, and you can teach him the corporate policies and procedures; but you cannot teach him the cultural nuances necessary for successful customer relations in the U.S.
I was on a customer service line with an Indian worker for AMEX and witnessed (via phone) her complete meltdown. A complete inability to handle the competing interests of the customer and her employer. In America, we understand (generally) the concept that the "customer is always right", even if we know that statement is a literal falsehood. I'm not so sure foreign cultures understand.
Good point. Most of them don't understand the reality that the customer might not always be right, but it's your job to make them think they are for as long as it takes to fix the problem, or at the very least have a damned good explanation and course of action to correct it. Most call centers everywhere are scripted, but the Indians have gone overboard with it and can't seem to operate on the fly. I have plenty of horror stories from friends that have encountered Dell's customer service.
Service centers are the tip of the iceberg. That's actually one of the simplest tasks in IT, which is why it was one of the earliest offshore candidates. Yet as you have noticed (and so has Dell, who reversed its decision to offshore support for business clients due to complaints similar to yours), the quality just isn't there.
Complex engineering is a far more difficult thing to offshore. The popular notion seems to be that it involves a highly skilled person sitting alone and doing mysterious things with a computer. In fact, it's a highly collaborative, communication intensive process. Some models of doing this lend themselves to better success offshoring, but most do not. And almost none can claim to offshore with no impact to productivity, quality, or timeline. The communication problems you notice in the call centers are amplified many times, even in well run engineering projects, by the simple volume of communication required.
Another thing being ignored is that, like most other countries in the world, the best and the brightest Indian IT workers come to the U. S. and pursue green cards. Assuming that these folks are representative of the average Indian IT worker is a fallacy.