Outsourcing vs. offshoring, and how U.S.-based technical writers can stay competitive

24
Jun6

RonBy Ron Creel

I have recently heard people confuse the distinction between “outsourcing” and “offshoring.”  To clarify, outsourcing is when a company hires another business, such as Your Writing Dept, to do a specific task for them either because they do not have that talent in their existing labor pool, or they need to temporarily add skilled members to their existing team, but cannot justify hiring them as permanent staff.

I have seen many cases where outsourcing is a cost effective method for a company to produce high quality written material for a fraction of the cost of having a full-time technical writer. And writers who work on outsourced projects have the ability to learn how to work quickly and can expand the breadth of their knowledge and portfolios. To fully appreciate the benefits outsourcing a writing project can bring to a business, one needs to look at the overall costs associated with maintaining a full-time writing team that might sit idle periodically for no fault of their own. Look at it this way, if you owned a medium-size manufacturing company that periodically needs new user guides to support new product, would you rather pay a technical writer $60,000 to $80,000 a year, or pay a U.S.-based outsourcing business $3,000 to $10,000 for several product manuals?Join us on Facebook

Offshoring, while similar to outsourcing, is the hiring of a company, or an individual, outside of the home country where the business operates. For example, if a company is based in the U.S. and hires a company in India to develop software user manuals, they would be offshoring this work. Sure, it’s also outsourcing the work, but careful use of the two terms helps define the specific benefits and downsides of these types of arrangements.

Frankly, from an American viewpoint, we do not want to see jobs taken away from people living in the U.S. So, aside from the emotional aspects of offshoring technical writing projects, there are several negative aspects to offshoring. One would be that native English speakers make better writers for an American audience. But, this is not to say that all Americans can write at an expert level. While labor costs can be much lower with offshoring, I have seen that costs can actually increase with the need to redo some of the work produced by offshore writers. Of course, communication differences and timezones can be a barrier to effectively working with an offshoring company.

Your Writing Dept is a Sacramento-based writing firm that specializes in developing technical manuals and user guides. We’re the leaders in technical communications in Northern California. Note: We outsource, rather than offshore. Email us for more information about our services at info@yourwritingdept.com.

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Will Bing become the new Google? [Revised]

10
Jun1

As search engines go, Google has pretty much set the standards over the years. I remember first using Web Crawler, and then moving to Altavista, and then Yahoo!, until Google came along. So I am not set on one search engine over another. I just want the best that a search engine can offer me.

View Your Writing Dept

I want it all is one location. I want to search for video and images on the same site I’m using for web searches. So is Bing going to bring it all together? From what I can tell after using Bing for less than a day, it looks as though it might just provide everything I need. But, I ask, is it really going to help me make decisions? I really think I can do that on my own, thank you. I just need a powerful search engine.

I plan to add to this post after I have more time with Bing and learn more about its power, or its hype.

Let me know what you think.

June 15, 2009 Update
Now that I have had a chance to use Bing for several days after the initial post, I wanted to give some feedback and further compare Bing with Google. I greatly question Microsoft’s sales pitch that Bing is not a search engine, but a Decision Engine. Say what? I’m thinking that it’s more of a “we direct you to where we want you to go engine.” Read that as, you will most likely go where Microsoft is getting its money.

Welcome pagebing
First, Google’s welcome page is simple and predictable. Bing, however, presents a new photo background on its default Explore page each day and provides links to more information that relates to the photo of the day. Frankly, I like the simplicity that Google offers. When it comes to a search engine. I want to search and not be presented with a random experience.

Setting Preferences
One of the first things you will want to do from the default page is to change your preferences from the Extras drop down menu. On the preferences page, you can change:

  • SafeSearch settings: sexual content controls go from Strict, Moderate to Off
  • Location
  • Display language
  • Number of results per page
  • Search suggestions: on or off
  • Search language

Photo search
This page opens with images relating to the default page’s photo and topic of the day. This is annoying. However, running your cursor over the image after your search for a topic will cause the image to enlarge and present more detailed information about the image, including file name, web site location, dimension and byte size.

Bing does conveniently allow for specializing and fine tuning your image searches with selection from a left-hand menu:

  • Size: small, medium, large or wallpaper
  • Layout: square, wide or tall
  • Color: color or black & white
  • Style: all, photograph or illustration
  • People: all, just faces, head & shoulders or other

Video search
With Bing, you get the feeling you are being force-feed TV shows and movies from Hula. But then again, searching for video clips is where Bing shines the most. It does present the offerings nicely and it is easy enough to search for video clips of your own choosing. One of the nicest features I’ve seen to date on Bing is the ability to run your cursor over the image of the video and run the clip directly on the search screen before opening it. This is convenient when you want to zip through video clips without needing to open them all.

Bing does conveniently allow for zeroing in on specific genre with selections on the left-hand site of the screen.

What is this Decision Engine they talk about?
The Decision Engine seems to be related to the shopping area of Bing. From what I can tell, it’s a way to do comparison shopping for things such as airline tickets. Sure, this is nice. But it doesn’t make Bing anything more than an over-hyped search engine.

Bottom line: Bing is a search engine with bells, whistles and a load of baggage I can live without. I’ll post more.

Your Writing Dept is a Sacramento-based writing firm that specializes in developing technical manuals and user guides. We’re the leaders in technical communications in Northern California. Email us for more information about our services at info@yourwritingdept.com.

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