The Recession Starts to Bite at Microsoft

The recession seems to be hitting Microsoft pretty hard, with them already laying off over 4000 staff since January. While this doesn’t seem to be hitting Microsoft’s flagship products, such as Windows and Office, yet, it has led to them scaling back in some other areas, including the ResponsePoint phone system, the .Net Micro Framework and the MSN Direct Service. While they have said they will continue to sell and support customers of these products, there may be no new software releases for a while.

However the case of .Net Micro Framework is an interesting pointer to how Microsoft may operate in the future. .Net Micro Framework is a scaled down software system designed to run on electronic devices such as smart wrist watches. Microsoft have released the program’s source code as a ?community development project’ meaning that any interested programmers can contribute code to the development.

You may think that this sounds like a handy ruse by Microsoft to get people to develop their products for them, for free, yet the open source movement is gaining increasing traction in the world of IT. The open source Apache web server has been the backbone of the Internet for years for example. Will this mean that we see an open source, freely distributable version of Windows in the near future? We doubt it here at the Windows Advisor, but stranger things have happened.