On his own blog, Dodge notes that "This was a total surprise to me, and management offered no explanation. This is pretty standard procedure, mostly for legal reasons, but none the less left me with a cold feeling...but only for a minute or two."

Dodge is a well-respected member of the Tech community and will certainly find employment elsewhere, but his departure will certainly cause a few ripples, particularly in the open-source community where he was a visible champion on the softening of Microsoft's stance.  While not necessarily directly involved, the deals with Novell to free Suse Linux from any patent lawsuits and also to sell Suse to any intractable customers who refuse Microsoft's server products clearly demonstrate his influence within the company.  He wrote about the deal three years ago, where you will read language entirely unexpected from a Microsoft employee.

One final 'twist' to the tale is that although Google offers a broad variety of web pages related to the lay-offs when Dodge's name is searched, Bing seems completely silent on the issue for at least the first 5 pages of results, unless one adds the word 'layoff' to the search!