I don't find it surprising that MS would have people using Perl. Like one of the prominent sigs on this site says: "90% of all software has already been written"....and alot of that is in Perl. So they use it. That's smart.

What really surpised me recently was how MS was outsourcing it's web sites to linux servers for security reasons. MS goes to linux

That speaks volumes, and would make me consider selling any MS stock which I owned.

If there is anything I would worry about from Microsoft dabbling with Perl, is that they will develope their own version, "slightly incompatible with standard Perl",then push it on all their users...like they tried with Java.