Bringing Tech Jobs Home

InformationWeek > Outsourcing IT Jobs > Onshore Outsourcing: Made In America > May 9, 2005

Startup Rural Sourcing has an alternative to offshoring: outsource IT work to smaller U.S. cities. The pitch? It’s still cheap and helps American workers.

Why send IT work to India when you can pay a little more and have it done in middle America or the South? The concept of providing IT services from some lower-cost regions in the United States made so much sense to Kathy White, former CIO at health-care conglomerate Cardinal Health Inc., that she took $2 million of her own money and started a business around it. “If we can outsource to India, then we can outsource to Arkansas,” White says.

M$ Will Do Anything to Sell More Software

Microsoft to slim down Windows XP for older PCs | InfoWorld | News | 2005-05-13 | By Joris Evers, IDG News Service

Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) is readying a slimmed-down version of Windows XP for users who want to upgrade their Windows operating systems but not their PCs.

The software, code-named Eiger, will be based on Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and is designed for server-centric computing environments. It can run on a system with a Pentium II processor, 128MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive, said Barry Goffe, a group product manager at Microsoft.

Microsoft has not yet decided when it will ship Eiger. The company plans to have a first beta test version ready later this year, and a technical preview version is being sent to a very small number of customers this week, Goffe said. Pricing has yet to be determined.