My employer, Microsoft Canada, announced that they are opening a new software development centre in Vancouver in the fall of 2007. It looks like MSFT is joining the ranks of Apple, which opened a development center in Yaletown.
The Microsoft Canada Development Centre will operate as one of a handful of development centers outside the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters; the others are located in North Carolina, Ireland, Denmark and Israel.
This is huge! I wish that the centre was going to be in Toronto. But this is a great start. It means that software products are being built in Canada. It will help bring additional talent and opportunities to Canada. Hopefully, the long-term impact will be to seed the Vancouver area with Fairchildren. This assumes that there aren’t fantastic design and development companies already in Vancouver, and that would be wrong. Here’s a short-list of existing companies:
It does make me wonder about the spinouts of other Canadian technology success stories. Where are the spinouts of Corel (is Halogen Software an offshoot?), RIM, Nortel?