Washington, July 31: The outsourcing mantra continues to work its magic. Despite the continuing backlash against outsourcing of both white-collar and blue-colur jobs, it has become very much a part of life as cost-concious US companies continue to outsource work to low cost markets, including India. Bill Gates, Chairman of the company said that Microsoft and other US firms may be sending work overseas to cut costs, but the market for software developer jobs in the US remains strong and needs more qualified candidates.

Addressing Microsoft's fourth annual Faculty Research Summit, Gates told researchers from 115 universities that fewer students were seeking computer science degrees.
Even scholarships designed to attract minority students to computer sciences were drawing fewer and fewer applicants, he told USA Today, reportedly.

US firms might be outsourcing some jobs, such as customer service call centers, he said, but pointed out that it was not the driving force turning away prospective computer science engineers.
He noted that there had been widespread pessimism about technological advances ever since the Internet 'boom' of the late 1990s and 2000 fizzled out. Bureau Report