Study Shows Microsoft Impact on German Job Market

A new study backed by U.S. software giant Microsoft shows that the company is either directly or indirectly responsible for almost 80,000 jobs in Germany. The Muenster Institute of Computational Economics calculated that every one of the 1,500 Microsoft employees was responsible for creating another 51 jobs in the German IT industry. “Microsoft is a job-creation motor in Germany,” Jürgen Gallmann, the head of company’s German unit, told the DPA news agency. “We can point to the 76,000 positions at our partners that deal directly with Microsoft Germany.” Microsoft is under pressure to prove its worth in Germany, as several public authorities have opted to switch to the open-source Linux operating system in recent years.