TechCrunch is reporting that social games portal hi5 has "significantly reduced" its staff. hi5 president and CTO, Alex St. John, told the site that the rumors are somewhat true because the company had migrated the social games portal to the Windows Server OS as part of a strategy to launch a "next generation social gaming platform" early next year. The new site will use the Microsoft .Net framework.
According to St. John, these changes allow hi5 to consolidate servers, increase performance, reduce costs, and cut back on the number of people required to support the site.
"As we have recently turned the corner on our technology migration efforts we have been able to significantly reduce the number of positions required to support the older hi5 site and are in the process of re-organizing the company to focus entirely on the development and deployment of our next generation social play site," he said.
Seeing as St. John is widely considered the "father of DirectX", it makes sense that he has moved from a platform that used open-source technology to one that almost exclusively uses Microsoft technology.
Source: GI.biz
