Microsoft moves U.S. jobs to India
Microsoft is starting to shift U.S.-based jobs to India as it seeks to lower technical support and development costs, the company said Wednesday.
The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant, long seen as a growing company immune to job losses, is now considering cutbacks in the United States while increasing staff in India, which turns out tens of thousands of English-speaking software engineers each year.

"With lots of English-speaking talent, we were thinking of a better way to tap into that," said S. Somasegar, Microsoft's vice president of Windows engineering services.

So far, Microsoft has about 200 engineers developing software in Hyderabad, the south India city where, five years ago, it opened its first product development center outside the United States.

Microsoft, whose Windows operating system and Office desktop software run on more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers, is recruiting people for a customer support center being launched in Bangalore as part of a pilot program.

Initially, Microsoft is hiring 150 people, but industry sources said the center could easily be scaled up to at least 1,000 people in about two years, if the pilot plan is successful.

"To meet the needs of our customers worldwide, we expect to continue to invest in a technical work force in India to assist us with our expanding product development, information technology and customer support functions," a representative of Microsoft in India said.

The software giant is betting on India's vast pool of low-cost technical workers and engineers who can be hired for roughly one-fifth what their counterparts earn in the United States.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-1023213.html