I don't know if this helps you or not; but I know 4 MSFT employees and 3 of them are pretty sure they are going to retire from there. All three I know from my d

I don't know if this helps you or not; but I know 4 MSFT employees and 3 of them are pretty sure they are going to retire from there. All three I know from my days consulting. The fourth I met while he was at Microsoft, and he gets to work on interesting things; I just don't know him well enough to ask him if he plans on being there for awhile. MSFT does have interesting projects going on as well. The R&D wing has its fingers in some pretty cool stuff like Surface and Photosynth.