The company plans to spend $1 billion over the next three years to add fourteen buildings to its Redmond campus, a move they had originally said would be performed over a twenty-year period.
Middle-age spread isn’t just for dog owners who like cheese. Perhaps the C-level executives at Microsoft were feeling the tick of Internet time creeping up their spines, as they disclosed their accelerated plans to expand their Redmond estate.
Microsoft execs and Washington state and local politicians shared the stage as the company made the announcement of its revised development plans.
“The acceleration of our campus expansion shows our ability to match that pace as well as our long-term commitment to employees and the region,” Brad Smith, senior vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement. “This plan provides us the space for the current and future talent who will help us achieve those goals.”
Once Microsoft completes that expansion in 2009, it will have one of the largest corporate campuses in the world. Constructing buildings is relatively easy, though. Microsoft has to bring on staffers to fill them, and lately the brightest and best seem to want to make their mark at Google’s headquarters.
Google has already lured away two Microsoft executives, Mark Lucovsky and Kai-Fu Lee, along with quite a few other staffers from Redmond. In previous years, Microsoft has only noted gains of some 500 net jobs in its SEC filings. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft’s new buildings fill up with new hires, or serve mostly to reallocate staff from existing buildings instead.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
