Sure, without a doubt, there are exellent devs to be found worldwide.
But let's face the reality ...
Western corporates don't go outsourcing in India for the talent.
They go outsourcing in India because they want to wield the axe on what they perceive as the expense of Western developers.
So, if they're not willing to pay Western developers, they're not exactly going to be looking at the premium end of the Indian talent pool either are they !
Especially as a typical remuneration structure for senior management is that you are rewarded with a bonus based on the amount of cost-cutting you've achieved.
In India, because of different levels of pay, one can get trained for first few years by working for cheap companies. Once they hone skills, they go for companies that pay them top: companies even below WITCH -> WITCH -> American companies in India -> American companies in America; that's how the pipeline works there. In the states, this pipeline is completely gutted: every company wants rockstars or hires fresh grads from select schools.
I beg to differ.
You're either ignorant or have no idea how many SW and HW you interact with regularly from big name companies, has been through the hands of skilled Indian or other offshore devs which while being cheaper than American devs, are in now way worse programmers, sometimes the opposite.
You seem to equate pay only with talent and skill, but that's rarely the case. Lower paid international devs aren't necessarily worse than their American counterparts and well paid American devs aren't always better than international talent.
Your pay is more a function of opportunities and supply/demand in your area rather then purely on your own skills. Otherwise explain me how the same international devs who struggle to crack 50k in their own developing country can suddenly score 200k+ the moment they're in the American labor market. They don't magically become 4x better coders the moment they cross the border.
Also, you're making it sound like the devs can do whatever they want and happened to deliver cool new features. As said, back then everything hinted at them just switching Workstation to maintenance mode and letting it slowly fade into irrelevance, so it wouldn't have mattered how brilliant that new team was.
