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Yeah, I thought that sounded strange. It would even be slightly embarrassing if all people needed more than one machine to get their job done.

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Microsoft develops operating systems.

I am aware of that :) When developing OS it might make sense to have two machines. (unless you can run in a VM, which I think many could)

But, not everyone at MS works with windows, which is why I was a little surprised about the statement that everyone had more than one machine.

Afaik 2 machines are almost mandatory 1. Dev machine 2. Email machine

The 2 biggest orgs inside MS are Office and Windows, devs in both of them can't have a single machine doing both the above tasks. (And VMs suck for disk based I/O, and that becomes a factor when you have multi-hour build time)

Yes, economy does impact internally at Microsoft. Thankfully, we have Hyper-V to have more than one OS in a given box. But back in the old days, two machines per person was pretty standard. I no longer work for MSFT, so not all orgs still stick to the same policy

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