Microsoft Job Openings May Indicate Status and Future of Geospatial

The Seattle Times blog that covers Microsoft tallies the 72 jobs the company has posted in Washington state since its layoffs last week. Some of the jobs offer insights into some geospatial projects.

Windows Live and MSN are also hiring locally, with at least a dozen openings out of the 72 posted in the past week. One posting described a “newly formed” MSN/Virtual Earth Core Platform team that will “define how developers, media producers, and businesses create, deploy, manage, and monetize one of the largest online networks on the planet.”

(The job posting also had some interesting usage stats about MSN and Virtual Earth: “over 600 internally developed sites serving 284M unique users/month and 15.5B pageviews/month. Those sites consume hundreds of applications/services, run over 400,000 feed ingestion jobs each day, and are served globally to 44 markets via 6 datacenters. Virtual Earth powers over 3000 enterprise customers and the Live Maps, Local Search, and 3D products.”)

Another want ad for a software development engineer outlined “a brand new MSN website focusing on local people, activities, and businesses. ... By combining the best of local content destinations (like City Guides and Weather) with the power of local search, we are embarking on a cutting-edge project to revolutionize the way people consume local content.”

The company’s Live Labs is also hiring, including the Seadragon team that helped bring Photosynth to market.