9/17/2003 -- In an interview with CertCities.com today, Dan Truax, director of Microsoft Certification Business & Product Strategy, addressed a rumor published in InfoWorld's "Notes from the Field" column last week that Microsoft Learning had laid of 30 content producers with plans to move its content development overseas, “possibly to India.”

In a statement issued to CertCities.com yesterday, Microsoft said that the layoffs -- which were made in conjuction with the formation of the new Microsoft Learning group -- affected a number of job types, and actually resulted in a higher employee to management ratio. "This flatter organization exists to empower employees to make decisions and service customers," it read.

In the interview today, Truax confirmed this statement and commented further on the issues raised in the column.

“There are two things that are being mixed and taken out of context [in the InfoWorld article]," he commented.

"One of the reasons that drove [the creation of Microsoft Learning] is that there was a lot of duplication of content, duplication of sales...so it was really important to us to be able to remove that duplication," he stated.

"We have always and continue to have some of the content creation done by partners, and we continue to invest in our partnerships..to create unique custom content," he explained. "With our partner model, [the] primary purpose for [overseas content creation] would be for them to customize to local market to meet international needs, and not our purpose to have content developed to meet our U.S. needs."

He said that such development is not unusual for a world-wide learning provider like Microsoft. "As a global company, if we don't do a good job serving our customers' needs and they're asking for localized content...it's my job to make sure that we’re meeting all of our customers' needs." -Becky Nagel