Everything I said applies to overseas labor, too. I’ve worked at both types of companies, those that co-locate support with the product teams, and those that pay bottom dollar and don’t care at all about support.

With the latter type, there’s still almost always a line of communication to corporate. And the support staff still try to help. They are decent human beings, even if the end result kind of sucks.

Its an organic cycle, as the company grows big the number of relevant areas grow too and inter team communication becomes way too costly/impractical. The big company becomes a group of informal small companies, each running in their own direction and at times competing with each other. Areas like customer support are not really good candidate for career growth so they get least resources and manpower.