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by copy_paste (拷又贴) at 2007.7.6 19:01 (#3788491@0)

WENDY STUECK

With files from Roma Luciw

July 6, 2007

VANCOUVER -- Betting on Vancouver's location, lifestyle and links to India and China, Microsoft Corp. plans to open a development centre in Vancouver in a bid to draw skilled high-technology workers from around the world.

"When you look at the supply in the marketplace of students with computer science degrees, two-thirds of all the graduates in the world are coming out of India and China and the Asia-Pacific region," Microsoft Canada president Phil Sorgen said yesterday. "And Vancouver has a very strong connection and a very strong link to that part of the world."

Microsoft already has a small presence in Vancouver, with about 60 sales and marketing employees working from a downtown office.

The new development centre will increase the U.S. company's footprint in Vancouver - already home to studios for high-tech players such as Walt Disney Co., Electronic Arts Inc. and Vivendi SA - and help it get around tight quotas on high-tech workers in the U.S.

Mr. Sorgen would not speculate about the makeup of workers at the centre, saying only that like all of Microsoft's development centres, it would recruit globally. The centre is expected to employ between 200 and 300 employees this fall and could eventually employ up to 1,000 people.

One advantage of opening up in Vancouver rather than in the U.S. may be in hiring international employees. It's generally easier to bring foreign high-tech workers into Canada than the U.S., said Craig Natsuhara, a business immigration lawyer with Davis LLP in Vancouver.

In a holdover from the high-tech boom earlier this decade, Canada has immigration provisions for seven different categories of information technology workers, Mr. Natsuhara said, including one called "embedded systems software designer" that Canadian firms frequently use to bring in programmers from outside of the country.

In the U.S., firms wanting to bring in high-tech workers are required to seek H1-B visas, which have come under fire for displacing American workers even as industry participants lobby for expansion of the program. The H1-B program has a quota, and "it gets filled up basically the day they start accepting applications," Mr. Natsuhara said.

The H1-B cap is currently set at 65,000 a year. In April, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received 150,000 applications for this year's H1-B visas in a single day. Canada does not have a visa quota.

Microsoft's Vancouver centre is part of a distributed development strategy that has seen Microsoft - headquartered in Redmond, Wash. - recently set up similar centres in Boston and Bellevue, Wash., and earlier in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel.

"Microsoft has a model that most of our development is done in Redmond and that continues to be the case," Mr. Sorgen said. "But we have recognized that to attract and be able to support global acquisition of talent, we have to look at [employment] markets beyond Redmond."

Those development centres complement research and development centres in Britain, India, China and California.

Staff at the centre will work on all of Microsoft's products and development areas, Mr. Sorgen said.

Vancouver is not a low-cost region in which to operate, but the city provides benefits that will likely help recruit skilled employees, he said.

New Media British Columbia has been working with provincial and federal governments in recent years to tackle immigration issues that affect high-tech employers, association president Lynda Brown said.

Immigration is also one of the top priorities for a recently launched digital entertainment task force struck to come up with ways to ensure the health of the sector in B.C.

MICROSOFT

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