Talk:Online outsourcing

Although it has been suggested this page be merged with Outsourcing, I thin there is room for it to be expanded with a specific focus on online outsourcing. There may be scope for it to be renamed Outsourcing for Small Business or similar, but there is clearly a major difference between the major outsourcing projects undertaken by major consulting firms and the small scale, micro-outsourcing undertaken on freelance marketplaces. I, for one, will be prepared to spend some more time expanding on the listing, with more focus on online outsourcing, micro-outsourcing and outsourcing on freelance marketplaces.

--- The term in more common use for this subject is online freelancing. For example, the number of results returned by Google for online outsourcing is a fraction of the results returned for online freelancing. I note that the term outsourcing has a bias towards the perspective of the buyer of services, while freelancing has a bias towards the perspective of the provider of services. I don't know what to suggest about that, as a perspective-neutral term should be preferred. ---

I don't think this subject should be merged because: it has distinctive characterstics that set it apart from related subjects and it is a subject that is increasing in importance.

Some distinctive characteristics:


 * An online marketplace to facilitate matching service providers and service buyers
 * A streamlined procurement/sales pipeline relative to traditional outsourcing
 * Competitive, market-based pricing in an environment of relatively open market information —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.139.204.75 (talk) 14:18, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

While this article uses the term "service agent" instead of "freelance marketplace", the latter term seems the norm in most other Wikipedia articles pertaining to the subject. Moreover, "service agent" seems quite unintuitive to me.

I do not mean to sound unreasonable, but this article reads like it was written by someone with little (or even zero) real-world experience on either side of the spectrum (whether freelancer, marketplace platform provider, or client). For example, the statement "Meetings are not feasible between service contractors and providers due to the large distances between them" is not in touch with reality, where audio/video/screensharing sessions are common. Furthermore, the terms "contractor" and "provider" can very well be taken to mean the same thing, making the statement even more inappropriate. There are many other such issues with the current article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.95.234.220 (talk) 04:12, 4 October 2014 (UTC)