Not many people know that Microsoft is not all about licenses, operating systems and games. They recently created a robotics group to develop new software for private and industrial robots, which they are giving away for free.

If you have a robot and need a software to run it, Microsoft could be the answer to your problem. The new software, Robotics Studio 1.5 will be offered for free for noncommercial use and the company will only be charging a small license fee to commercial users.

For now, the robotics department is just taking the first steps, as it has only 11 employees working on developing the new software, out of the total of 76,000. But this team is an elite one, backed by a 26-year company veteran who got the full attention of Bill Gates himself.

Sure, they are operating in a small set of open office affectionately called the "Broom Closet," but some companies started out in a garage and are now giants of the industry. The estimated budget is minute, compared to that of major projects. But it allows the gathering of a set of tools that may soon monopolize robot manufacturers.

With this project, they hope to do what MS-DOS and then Windows did to PCs and their expectations are high, since the robot sector is worth today an estimated $11 billion, is expected to double in value by 2010, and it could exceed $66 billion by 2025, according to estimates by the Japan Robot Association,

What's also interesting is that the elite group of 11 programmers has been hand-picked from around the world, so the three of them do not come from the same country, maybe as proof the uniformization can be achieved through diversity, so their future applications could use this in their slogans.