Maxxmodelz is right about the market, and doesn't emphasize an important part of it. The cost is not coming out of the buyer's pocket. Like the TV set that was manufactured by polluting somebody else's river. Who cares? Case in point: I work in a department with six people; two of us are professional photographers. A marketing colleague is preparing a half-page flyer. She called me over to help her get three stock photos she had purchased for the flyer at Getty. (It required "downloading.") They cost $200 apiece and one was a 14K jpg of the glass front of a washing machine, with suds. We are not talking Ansel Adams here. Instead of using house resources to snap the pictures, which will be used as clip art at the bottom of the flyer and would have cost, say, $100 plus benefits (assuming we weren't idle at the time), she spent $500-$700 dollars on stuff a high-school kid could have done with a throwaway camera. Why? Because it wasn't her money. It doesn't help, of course, that this is a government environment, so even the management has that "not my money" mindset. I'm sympathetic to the AutoCADing architect who doesn't have the time or the skills to create a 3D couch for his visualization, and I'm glad it's reasonably easy to gather up what one needs to deal with that situation. What I have no sympathy for, because I see it as yet another manifestation of our self-privileging gluttony, is the "Who cares what it costs? The client is paying for it, not me" attitude. I don't want Calcutta to put TurboSquid out of business; I want them to put that architect out of business. When the third world begins to put CxO's and other financial narcissists on the breadlines, outsourcing will take on a whole new color. I'd love to see the day when upper management is peddling its ass for a cup of soup. I'll even donate the K-Y. M