Reverse offshore

Off shoring in IT industry is to make software in lower cost countries. For Japanese it means China. Thailand is also a country with low labor cost. It should be cheaper to make software in Thailand than in Japan.

But now I think it is time to start thinking about reverse off shoring. Especially large scale development. What I am concerned are 3 things.

1. Increasing labor cost and other costs in Thailand while decreasing labor cost and commodity price in Japan.

2. Time for translation and miscommunication

3. Inadequate number of engineers with high skill in Thailand while skilled engineers of both Japanese and foreign (China and Korea) in Japan.

I guess some of Japanse agree with this but there are not many who will actually reverse off shore the next project. Not easy to convince senior management.