SEATTLE: On a cloudless summer day, Manish Prabhu stares out at a converted soccer field thousands of miles from his native India and watches a cricket ball skip past some fielders dressed in white.
It is an unlikely place for a game of cricket, but Prabhu has spent hundreds of afternoons playing with the Microsoft Cricket Club on this bumpy turf near the company's campus in Redmond, Washington.
"The chance to play so much cricket surprised me," said Prabhu, a senior program manager at Microsoft Corp.'s automotive business.
"There is someone in almost every business team at Microsoft that I've played cricket with."
Microsoft's cricket program, comprising four teams that compete against other local teams, is not just a corporate softball team for the globalization era. It is a valuable tool in keeping the company's largest minority group happy.
Competing against fast-growing technology companies in India offering jobs with handsome pay raises and quick promotions, Microsoft has to work harder these days to attract and retain the best and brightest Indian engineering talent.
Furthermore, Microsoft like many technology companies is being squeezed by US immigration quotas limiting the number of work visas issued to foreign nationals.
Over the last decade, as Microsoft has nearly quadrupled its workforce, it has hired scores of computer science graduate students from India who have stay on to work in the United States after finishing graduate school here.
Employees of Indian descent estimate they make up about 15 percent of Microsoft's 35,000 workers in the greater Seattle area.
The company does not keep track of such figures, but said it has made adjustments for changes in its workforce demographics.
"Our programs and policies have changed given the diversity that has come into the company," said Mylene Padolina, a senior diversity consultant at Microsoft.
