I was referring to "moving into a devices and services model for revenue as opposed to a software licensing model" - which I think is likely.
If every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by volunteers begging for donations from said companies.
What will be left is devops jobs, "full stack" engineers, i.e. all jobs where you can't really focus on developing software.
Very few interesting jobs may remain in Microsoft Research.
The other possibility is that if every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by employees of said companies.
This is already the case for many projects, isn't it? In the case of OpenBSD, several of the core developers are either owners or employees of companies that use OpenBSD in their operations. Some of these companies are infrastructure providers, some are device / appliance vendors, some are consultancy shops...
If every company starts doing this (using open source!), the majority of software will be written and maintained by volunteers begging for donations from said companies.
What will be left is devops jobs, "full stack" engineers, i.e. all jobs where you can't really focus on developing software.
Very few interesting jobs may remain in Microsoft Research.