Analysts at Griffin Securities conducted a handy piece of research on Microsoft recently: scanning the company's careers websites and analyzing the details of the more than 2,000 jobs on offer. What kind of people Microsoft is hiring, and the words the company uses in its advertisements, can give a useful early warning on the kind of projects it is putting more (and less) effort into.

What did they come up with? Here's a few intriguing details:

- Expect much better streaming video services in the next-generation Xbox console, expected to be out later this year. 'A combination keyword search of 'streaming video' and 'Xbox' yielded four dozen open positions, ' Griffin wrote. Hooking up televisions to the world of the internet is still a fragmented market and one that nobody seems to have totallycracked yet, and it looks like Microsoft wants to make sure its next Xbox is competitive with all the other streaming media boxes out there.

- Microsoft has four times as many jobs available in Germany (136) than France (33). In fact, Microsoft has more openings in Israel (39) than all of France.

- No advertisements could be found for hardware-related jobs in the Windows Phone division, 'an interesting result if Microsoft had chosen to develop a branded phone,' Griffin wrote.

- Search is still a big focus for new talent: there were 249 job openings working on the Bing search engine, compared to 66 for Office (and no search results at all for Mac Office).

No jobs, of course, for Windows XP -- still on 39% of computers -- as the decade-old operating system is set to be summarily executed next year.

Tom Gara