BANGALORE, INDIA: Microsoft refreshes its product like every two-three years. From Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, we are now at the 2010 version; soon we would see the fourth edition of Sliverlight, the web application framework from Microsoft. This is all the result of the deep research and development that goes behind bringing Microsoft to be one of the highest spending companies in R&D.

Speaking to CIOL on the sidelines of Tech.Ed, Moorhty K Uppaluri, general manager, developer and platform evangelism, said Microsoft invests around $ 9.5 billion in a year in research and development alone. He added, “Ours might be the only company to have continued investing even during the tough days of economic slowdown.”

Though he declined to share investment details for the Microsoft India Development India Centre (MSIDC), he hinted that India is a strategic centre for the company and is expected to beef up its investment in the R&D to bring out more innovation.

The India developer community is the second highest globally after the USA community.

“In India, we are roughly around 2 million developers, where some 1.3 million are IT professionals and the remaining are from student and research community,” Moorthy said, adding, “The Indian family is growing by 16 -18 per cent while in the US it is around 3-4 per cent only. So given the growth in the India developers we would soon be the largest team of developers.”

Talking about the Microsoft strategy he said, “Today all the consumers look at three different screens, namely the television, computer monitor and mobile. From Microsoft, we have a coherent strategy of enabling all the three screens; television, monitor and mobile phone.”

In a developed state like USA, the maximum number of eyeballs hit a monitor, followed by a television and then a mobile phone, while in India, Mobile screen hit the maximum followed by TV screen and then PC.

Moorthy commented that today, with the changing times, the definition of programmer is changing. Today’s programmers look for ready-to-use tools, SDKs, which is why the new Visual Studio 2010, is a ready-to-use tool for the programmers to develop their applications.