Quoting Boston.com

In a move that will expand Microsoft Corp.'s footprint in the Boston area by about 75 percent, the software company plans to sign a lease this week at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, just around the corner from the new Kendall Square offices of rival Google Inc.

Microsoft will be leasing 136,000 square feet in the 17-story high-rise office tower, overlooking the Charles River, in addition to the 46,000 square feet the Redmond, Wash., company agreed in April to lease for employees of Softricity, a Boston company it acquired last summer.

The building is owned by Equity Office, a commercial real estate arm of Blackstone Group, the big New York private equity firm. Microsoft will be leasing eight floors, roughly half the building, in three stages.

Microsoft currently leases about 183,000 square feet of space in Waltham, Beverly, and South Boston. With the new space, it will have the capacity to roughly double its 550 employees in Massachusetts by the end of the decade, though the company has yet to decide how it will use the space. Among the possibilities are beefing up its research and development activity, housing start-ups it purchases in the Boston area, and consolidating Microsoft operations from other area sites.

"It gives us great potential to grow here," said Ted MacLean , Microsoft's general manager for New England. "The proximity to MIT is important. MIT has historically been a great source of job candidates for us, and it will continue to be. Boston is quickly approaching the size where it could be one of our largest sites in the United States."

Though cofounder Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer both attended Harvard University in the 1970s -- with Ballmer graduating and Gates dropping out to start his software company -- Microsoft has had a relatively small presence in the Boston area until recently. Its area employment has more than doubled from 250 since 2004 with the acquisitions of Groove Networks in March 2005 and Softricity last July. Softricity has become Microsoft's SoftGrid product team.

Microsoft employs more workers in Dallas and Charlotte, N.C., along with Redmond, California's Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington, D.C., than it does in the Boston area.

Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie , the Groove founder who moved to Seattle to join Microsoft after it bought his company, has been lobbying in-house for several years to increase the company's presence in Massachusetts, one of the nation's leading high-tech states. One of Microsoft's top software competitors, IBM Corp., has more than 4,900 employees in the state, and search giant Google recently set up a Cambridge outpost at One Broadway and plans to double its 50-person workforce there by year-end.

"Ray's been a huge advocate for us in terms of raising the visibility of Massachusetts as a talent pool we need to do a better job of tapping into," MacLean said. "He's been consistent with that message."

Technology companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco Systems Inc. are expanding in the area partly to take advantage of research ties to Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other schools, said Paul Guzzi , president and chief executive of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. Guzzi said Microsoft's move is "obviously very good news for the region."

Under the terms of its new lease, set to be signed by the end of this week, Microsoft will be taking the first, second, 10th, and 11th floors of One Memorial Drive immediately, with 95 employees from its SoftGrid group set to move there from their office in South Boston in September. Next year, Microsoft will take the ninth floor, and by the end of 2009 it will take the 15th, 16th, and 17th floors.

"We are very pleased to have Microsoft as a new tenant and to assist with their growth in the Boston and Cambridge markets," said Marshall Findley , a managing director for the Blackstone Group.

For now, the company will keep its three other sites in the Boston area: its district office in Waltham with 285 employees, a separate technology center in Waltham with 35 employees, and its Office Groove development center in Beverly with 140 employees.

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