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Microsoft this afternoon filed its Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is the annual report in which the company offers a broad update on its business. I'm sifting through it now and will be posting anything new or notable. In the meantime, feel free to read along with me and post your own notes in the comments below.

Acquisitions: Microsoft spent $8.8 billion on 21 acquisitions in its 2008 fiscal year. That was a huge increase over prior years, but most of the money went toward the company's $5.9 billion acquisition of aQuantive, and its $1.3 billion purchase of Fast Search & Transfer (Pgs. 55-56).

Excluding those deals, Microsoft says it paid a total of $1.6 billion, mostly cash, for 19 companies. So even without the big deals, Microsoft spent more in fiscal 2008 than in the prior year, when it put $1.34 billion into acquisitions. But setting aside aQuantive and Fast, the company's average deal size this year dropped considerably -- coming in around $84 million, compared with $103 million in the previous fiscal year.

Microsoft also confirmed the price of its Danger acquisition: $500 million.

Employment by category: The filing shows a big jump in product support and consulting services employment, which rose to 17,000 people, after holding steady at 13,000 people the past two years. That's a 31 percent increase in employment in that category. I've asked the company for an explanation, and I'll update this post depending on the response (Pg. 12).

[Update, Friday: A Microsoft spokesman attributes the increase in that category to employees added through the company's aQuantive acquisition.]

The company's biggest category of employment, product research and development, continued to grow at a fast clip. Here's a quick chart showing the trends in the categories during the past five years.

Risk factors: We're not the only ones engaging in this exercise. PaidContent points out a thinly veiled reference to Apple that Microsoft added to its rundown of corporate risk factors (Pg. 13) this year:

A competing vertically-integrated model, in which a single firm controls both the software and hardware elements of a product, has been successful with certain consumer products such as personal computers, mobile phones and digital music players.

There's also this new reference to Google:

An example of an advertising-funded business model is Internet search, where providing a robust alternative is particularly important and challenging due to the scale effects enjoyed by a single market dominant competitor.

Competition: It's always interesting to see which companies Microsoft adds -- and drops -- from its lists of competitors for each division.

Notable changes this year include the addition of Apple as a Windows Mobile competitor (based on the iPhone launch), and of Autonomy as an enterprise software competitor. Also, it's not clear if this is significant, but the company doesn't list any rivals to Windows Media Player this year, which means RealNetworks no longer gets a mention as a competitor.

Real Estate: The filing says the company now has 13 million square feet of office space in the Seattle region (up from 11 million last year) -- consisting of 9 million square feet of owned space in Redmond (up from 8 million last year) and 4 million square feet of leased space (up from 3 million).

Microsoft has 2 million square feet of owned space elsewhere in the U.S. (up from 1 million last year) and 4 million square feet of leased space elsewhere in the U.S. (3 million last year).

Internationally, it has 2 million square feet of owned space (up from 1 million last year) and 8 million square feet of leased space (no change).