> Microsoft sets up MSN R&D center in China: sources
> Wed Jan 31, 2007
> SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Software giant Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O:
> Quote, Profile , Research) is setting up a research and development center
> in Shanghai for its online MSN service, its first such center outside the
> United States, sources familiar with the plan said on Wednesday.
This wouldn't surprise me. Microsoft is building a large campus in Shanghai, and my group already has a team based there; they rotate developers from China to Redmond and from Redmond to China for one-month stints to encourage us to get to know one another. I've seen flyers in the cafeteria advertising for senior engineers with knowledge of corporate culture to move to Ireland, Hyderabad, Beijing, and Shanghai to help get these centers off the ground. I've heard that if you take a permanent position overseas you get put on the local payroll, which means a 30% pay cut in China (which is almost certainly not a 30% cut in standard of living) -- not so good if you have a mortgage and family, but not so bad if you're single and/or got rich on stock options and have a hankering for travel.
The people they hire in these centers are genuine Microsoft employees, blue badge and everything, so it's not outsourcing -- it's about as benign a manifestation of globalization as I've ever heard of. In some ways it doesn't surprise me. Bill Gates's foundation is focused on aid to poorer countries; it's a topic he's clearly concerned with, and it would be logical that the company he helms is also going to address those issues, insofar as it isn't financial suicide (and frankly, with Microsoft's market position, it won't be).
(I held my tongue through the discussion of Vista -- it's not my product. But I do find it very amusing that Jobs came out in favor of eliminating digital DRM just weeks after Microsoft released an operating system that probably had a hundred million dollars in development costs go into its bondage-and-discipline DRM path. I think he's politically savvy in a way Microsoft upper management never has been.)
-- John S Costello joxn.costello at gmail.com "As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air--however slight--lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness." -- Justice William O. Douglas