Simple: there's devs in India who can code well and not every Western developer is an irreplaceable John Carmack so not every offshoring story ends badly.
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.
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.
I am also not disputing that there is a proportion of companies out there who go to India for all the best reasons, a genuine quest for talent.
But sadly, I think we have to accept the reality that such companies are very much in the minority. The reality, sadly, is that the majority of companies who outsource to India only do so for one reason. Aggressive cost-cutting.
Of course companies will optimize for the best bang for the buck labor the same way you optimize for the best bang for the buck products when you shop for something, that's how capitalism works, it's a two way street.
Now if the move to India, or anywhere else, lowers the development cost without lowering the product quality, why is that a problem?
I would understand this being an issue when offshoring causes the quality of the product to go to shit, but it often isn't the case anymore, so what's then problem here?
Unless of course you mean the problem is "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!" which would be understandable but like I said, capitalism is a two way street.
Supply and demand. American companies needed "developers, developers, developers", and when the supply is very finite and at the same time the investment markets were flush with "dumb money" that begs for at least a pittance of ROI, so in the end they ended up in bidding wars.
So now when a developer from <insert poor country here> enters the US labor market, their market value increases simply because they are now adding to the supply side of the US labor market - them being in the US is the factor.
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.
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.