Portugal Shows How Euro Crisis Is Shuffling the Tech Order

Here’s how it works: You’re building a Web service in the U.S. or Western Europe, but you realize Silicon Valley, New York, and London are terribly expensive places to hire programming talent. So you hire staff in a developing economy, perhaps Eastern Europe. And why not? Skilled programmers outside the West are cheaper and whip-smart, helping you save money and improve your product.

It’s an approach that has worked well for such big names as Skype, Wikia, Opera Software, and many others. But guess what? That’s not necessarily the way it works anymore. Partly because of Europe’s financial crisis, some of the “old” countries are now becoming the jumping-off point for services in developing economies, and not the other way around.