Really? have you ever worked with an Indian offshore development team? and that is not a criticism, simply the result of bitter experience.
Yes, with many firms (both small and large). Steadily with one for the past 5 years. Works for me. But I've had offshore disasters with folks from all over the globe. No country is immune to stupidity and laziness regardless of their tongue.

I have a guy from India that worked here for me for 10+ years and decided to go home. He provides the daily supervision. We have a call every morning and every evening. He and his team manage my legacy code. Run the jobs and do break/fix. We use a subset of the methods and procedures that I learned early on in my career and I have modified/tweaked over the years as necessary to adapt to changes in technologies and techniques. It's not some over burdened CMM Level 5 BS doc. It's streamlined, repeatable processes and tightly integrated doc that allow us to deliver high quality work in a reasonable timeframe with adequate oversight and measurable deliverables/results.

sometimes I'll speak German instead of English,
Gore, you missed ur calling. shoulda been a standup comic. too frickin funny.

And yes... Jersey's got'em too...

The north jersey bennies, a la Tony Soprano. "Fageddaboutit!"
The central jersey... "a couple two, tree. You know, youse guyz"
Most of south jersey is south of the mason dixon line. I cant understand them at all.

it comes across as a bit condescending
I dont take any offense, after all, he's a brit.

I also wasnt trying to offend with Queen English <> English.
The fact is that many people can read and write English, but that doesnt mean they communciate effectively regardless of the tool (email, IM, phone, whatever).

To get back to the topic...
I use IM for business on a daily basis and it's an important part of my toolkit.

Specifically, I use Adium. Have several different accounts. One for work (MSN), one for personal (AIM) and one (Captain Ron's Chat) that I built for my children. It's a closed system based on jabber. It was my compromise to "Daddy, I want an AOL account".