Microsoft is now among the many technology firms that have been hit with hard times. The answer to fixing the problems with profitability and poor performance for Microsoft and most other technology firms is to cut jobs and reduce spending.

Microsoft did just that when it announced earlier this week that it would chop 5,000 jobs from its workforce. Among the first casualties to come in the job cuts are reported to be the entire development team for Microsoft's long running Flight Simulator franchise.

Flight Simulator is one of the longest running franchises in gaming with the first version going back to 1982. In fact, Flight Simulator was the game that brought me from Atari consol games to PC gaming in my youth.

The fact that the entire Dev team for Flight Simulator has been axed all but guarantees that Flight Simulator is grounded. The same dev team was reportedly at the helm of another simulation product form Microsoft called Microsoft Train Simulator.

This is a sad day for gamers and fans of Flight Simulator and we can only hope that the axing of the development team doesn’t mean Flight Simulator X is the last version of the venerable game we will ever play.