Thomas Friedman has a knack/radar of picking popular  topics to write about.  No wonder his books kept showing up in class rooms' reading list. 

Anyway, software and technical services outsourced to English speaking in developing countries  made US headlines when there were a series of corporations' layoffs and shutdowns. Some lawmakers raised this concern and the Bush administration - being patriotic and all,  offered some incentives for corporations not to outsource. Although, the admistration itself does not practice what it preaches - i.e. security service provided to US embassy in Iraq was outsourced to a private company - and the reason? it's cost efficient.

So, buttomline continues to prevail when the world is flatter and borderless. The comment by MFEC's CEO pretty much reflected the nature of software industry. Although, country is not company, to  survive in this flatter world, Thailand Inc. and its governing bodies need to think outside the box.

I have not read the book yet. My guess if UNT (U of North Texas) got mentioned in Friedman's book, was because of its "world class" music program. Especially jazz, UNT started the program on jazz study when jazz was not taken seriously as music worth studying.

One more note on outsourcing, when I called Texas Energy that provides electricity to households, I talked to their customer service in the Phillipines!  

My request could have been handled by a robot but that was two years ago. I need to call them back to find out if they replaced cheap labor with a robot yet!

This does not mean that robot will rule the world, it means companies will find ways to improve their bottomlines. I read somewhere else that Thailand's economy is the size of Tennessee's - that's tiny in world's standard. I don't think we can compete in size with India or China. But we should be smart enough to pick a battle that we can win!