a downside of offshoaring I never thought off

First off sorry if the title has spelling errors, English is not my mother tongue šŸ™‚

I’ve got my new car radio installed and I can again listen to my precious podcasts. I can even connect a usb stick with podcasts on it \o/.
Yesterday I was listen to a binrev show. They were discussing security aspects and offshoaring. They were talking about an offshoaring to china that wen’t horribly wrong. A well known US car builder wanted to offshoar the assembly line to China. They contacted a Chinese company to handle this. They sent all the data for building the shops. The chinese company took the data and created there own assembly line and started producing their own cars, they were almost an exact copy of the cars they were building in the US, because the didn’t have to do any research they had cut a lot of costs. Combine that fact with the low wages and you can imagine why the car was incredibly cheap.
They tried to sue the Chinese company but the (Chinese) judge ruled in favor of the Chinese company (what would you expect).

Maybe call me narrowminded, but I see this as another good reason not to do offshoaring (or do it,but don’t move everything). If I’m not mistaken more and more companies are offshoaring their it development to other countries. I’ve got no problem with that, but if you do, make sure that you know what you are doing. If you offshoar everything those companies know exactly how your company works. If they manage your email systems, I bet they have almost enough data to create an exact copy of your local company and produce all the products you produce. They didn’t even have to do any research. Ok, if they did it theirselves you would know. But what if one of their employees has a usb stick of 10 gig and they take the data and sell it to a small competitor over there. You can be sure that some big supermarket in the western world will notice and start importing it.

I haven’t noticed the offshoaring of IT development that much. But I know some companies are doing it, offcourse it’s cheaper. But did they ever think about what impact this could have? Just imagine that google had offshoared the actual writting of their search engine to a Chinese company? Would they still be in the position they are in at the moment? I really doubt it!

In short, think before you do something (as always)

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