Laid-off Microsofties in Seattle offered free office space, Linux servers

This is very clever, especially given that R&D was cited in articles as being in the crosshairs.

There's a stereotypical Microsoftie that only knows MS tools and doesn't care to expand their horizons or stay educated on new trends in the larger industry. However, there's a lot of talent locked up in Redmond that could really innovate if not bound by MS corporate strategy. Getting your entrepreneur-centric product in front of these eyes is a brilliant idea.

I'd love to see this happen in the Valley too. The amount of companies who have been bleeding the wrong people because of management politics is astounding. I'd love to see some of those people use their packages to bootstrap some startups.

If you par down your lifestyle a few months at corporate pay is probably at least half a year of "ramen living".

I'm used to getting cursed for Outlook - not so much for SharePoint (in my defense, I left SharePoint after V1 - there's lots I'd change - especially cross-browser support and build a real framework architecture).

When people swear at me for my other products, I bring up that I was one of the original Excel developers, and that usually absolves me of my subsequent sins ;-),

Sharepoint! You f#@ker! Koss!!! shaking fist

(Sorry, that's lame, take my karma.. I couldn't help it.)

Good marketing though, since they presumably have a bunch of free space, and offering one "free month" is costing next to nothing.