From Bruce Williams, a longtime member of the FS development team at Microsoft, comes sobering news:
The cuts announced at Microsoft yesterday include closing the entire ACES studio, the group that produced Flight Simulator and related products. […] I don’t know yet if there’s any hope that the code could be spun off to a third party, but as of January 22, the most important asset–the team that has produced FS for so many years–has been disbanded.
James Fallows has more, including a couple of evocative screenshots.