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Microsoft’s recruitment web site continues to be an excellent place to find out about its future plans for Skype, with a new job ad specifically advertising for an engineer to help integrate Skype within the company’s next Xbox.
The exciting part of the job ad asks for someone who’s keen to help in “enabling amazing new in-game and in-console voice and video experiences for the next generation of Xbox,” which, given that the position is based in Skype’s London office, is pretty much a cast iron guarantee of Skype/Xbox love in some distant future. Or at the very least, the existing Xbox Live chat system might suddenly find itself rebranded and painted blue
The ad also states the position is “a crucial initiative for Xbox, and it is time-critical given the hardware lead times involved,” suggesting Microsoft’s already hard pressed when it comes to meeting its internal deadlines for its Xbox 720 development. [MS via The Verge]
Hmmmm…Microsoft spends buckets of money on a company that specialises in speech and then seeks to integrate it into its own Unified Comms framework (including the Xbox Division).
I think the term I’m searching for is: “No shit Sherlock”.