[pilib]

Did anyone read cost-effective manpower as cheap? :(

I'm from Serbia, and still living here. The local market is small and extremely undeveloped. Telecommunication infrastructure is sub-standard, no non-ISP/corporate data centers and no multiple backbone links. While the cloud/grid hosting solves that particular problem, there are others.

Running a company here costs you around 300€/month, whether you have profit or not. That doesn't include office space or bills, taxes only. Note that it is the average net monthly salary, but you can't live of it really.

Corruption. Shitty infrastructure. No Paypal and no widely available (and inexpensive) card-processing options. I'm not sure about getting a proper, signed SSL certificate either.

All of the above can be circumvented, yes. The problem is that when you are so far behind everyone else society wise, ideas and visions that are popping in your head are being sold as a commodity in the rest of the world, and even if you have a nice, modern, innovative idea, unless you are wealthy, you wont be able to implement it because of so many bureaucratic obstacles.

So, what do we have here? A bunch of IT service and programming sweatshops, outsourced of course. Because of relatively cheap labor.

It is my opinion that having an inspiring and motivating, if not competing environment helps innovation.