Dell, you don't get it, do you?

Yesterday during a visit to the outsourcing Ground Zero of Bangalore, India, Dell Inc. chairman Michael Dell announced it will double its India-based workforce from 10,000 to 20,000 within three years.

That's Michael Dell at the press conference.

"Dell has set up huge business process outsourcing units to tap India's vast pool of low-cost English-speaking workers, as other multinationals such as General Electric have done," Reuters notes.

Although the hiring effort will also boost Dell's in-country capacity to build products for the India market, an Associated Press article about the announcement points out that "most of the hiring will be made at the company's call centers."

Somewhere in this announcement is the calculation that the widely derided state of Dell's largely India-based consumer customer service isn't hurting business from just plain consumers like you and me. And if Dell can keep saving money by outsourcing customer service jobs overseas, well, the stock price is more important than customers.

After all, the institutional investors - the ones who clamor for higher and higher profit margins - are a far more significant constituency than the buying public, right?