Given the very negative beef that offshoring has in the U.S. technology
industry I've found it interesting how favorable Microsoft employees
are towards the practice. From reading the blogs of various Microsoft
employees, it seems a number of different products now have part of their development
team in Asia. Below are excerpts from a few of blog posts that highlight this trend.
In his post
Some Kahuna Stuff, Omar Shahine of
Hotmail Windows Live Mail writes
Finally, Aditya announced that he will
be moving
to Shanghai, to work in our MSN Shanghai Tech Center. We actually have a
small team of really smart developers and testers over in Shanghai that are
working on various aspects of Kahuna. For those of you that have Kahuna
accounts, they are responsible for getting the MSN Calendar into the M3 release
of Kahuna which is a project I worked on in my "spare time" while also working
on Kahuna M3. I'll be going over to Shanghai in a few weeks to hang with them.
Aditya (who is one of the folks I
manage) is one of the co-creaters of FireAnt, the technology that we built
Kahuna on. While he'll be missed around the hallways of our campus, he'll be
continuing to do some great stuff over in China. It's an amazing opportunity,
and I'm really excited about growing and building a strong product development
team there.
In his post Travel and Books Chris Anderson of Avalon Windows Presentation Foundation writes
Just got back from China. I spent last week visiting the Microsoft office in
Beijing. The Avalon team is partnering with a group in China to produce some of
the control and features in Avalon. It was great to get to meet all the folks
over there. So, over the past 3 weeks I've spent 1 in LA, 1 in Seattle, and 1 in
Beijing.
In the post IE Development in China, Christopher Vaughan of the Internet Explorer team writes
Tony
Chor, Rob
Franco, and myself are in Beijing today as we make our way to Kuala Lumpur
for the Hack-In-The-Box
conference. We have a great team over here in what we call the ATC (Advanced
Technology Center). In the past 6 months they’ve gone from just starting to
adding serious value to IE 7. The folks over here have already contributed to IE
7 by re-writing the select control which Chris Wilson alluded to in his post
from the
PDC. Other improvements that we’ll see come out of the ATC for IE include
improving our bi-directional font support, font linking and fallback
improvements, and increased accessibility support. Watch for more blog posts in
the future from our teammates here in China covering the
kinds of things they’re working on.
I think it's really cool that Microsoft employees are comfortable
with the fact that it is a global company. I've seen some of the
emotion and rhetoric around offshoring and U.S. companies get ugly which is unfortunate. Of
course, Microsoft has a rather diverse and international work force
which probably helps a lot.