Posted on 07/17/2014 6:54:56 AM PDT by John W
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wasn't kidding -- he really is making bold changes.
The software giant said it would cut 18,000 jobs within the next year -- about 14% of the company's 125,000 employees. That's by far the largest round of layoffs in the company's history.
The previous record came during the lowest point of the Great Recession, when Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) cut more than 5,000 jobs in 2009 -- the first mass layoff in the company's history.
Most of the latest round of layoffs -- 12,500 -- will come from Nokia's devices and services business that Microsoft recently bought. In a memo to Microsoft's staff, Nadella said that Microsoft found many redundancies between the two companies, including both professional and factory workers.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
A big company bought a not-so-big company. Should they just have “make-work” jobs for the people who are no longer needed? Should the Feds have stepped in and prevented the purchase?
But there’s a shortage of high skilled workers, according to the greed heads. Here’s 18k more to add to the pile and ignore while looking overseas for new blood.
18,000 is a disaster. It’s a drop in the bucket overall in the obummer economy, and it’s a complete, total disaster in human numbers.
Actually I don’t care. I’m just saying the government will lie about the impact as they have done every day since the boy king was imaculated.
I’m betting there will be ~18,000 new employees in India working on a Microsoft contract. The race to the bottom continues....
Funny thing is, Microsoft was one of the CEO’s who last attended Obama’s whitehouse jobs creation solution task force.
Just another company take over.
Now if we can apply the same efficiencies and redundancy cutbacks to government workers, we could cut the federal workforce in half.
H1b’s and undocumented immigrants to the rescue!
A Penny saved is a Penny earned.
As true today as it was hundreds of years ago.
MS products aren't getting any better. Last years of Ballmer's reign were a disaster of epic proportions; he was that close to killing the company. We shall see if the new boss listens to his own words and starts addressing the needs of his customers. Windows 9 better be usable in business environment, or else - the Win8 rejection was the last warning.
Will MS go out of business? Of course, it depends. It wouldn't be out of question if they kept Ballmer. Now it's impossible to say. The fate of MS is in hands of the current team. But purely theoretically, MS could easily commit harakiri by making their latest flagship products unworkable and refusing to sell/support anything that is already deployed. Even if businesses have no burning desire to bury MS, they would be simply unable to use the new toy OS and the new touch-controlled server. Server is controlled by PowerShell, not by GUI, by the way (the GUI only invokes PS.)
The acquisition of Nokia was yet another attempt of Ballmer's MS to barge into the cellphone market. I cannot imagine how they intended to do that on the back of a loser, though. Now they got exactly what they paid for - and they are now dismantling their purchase, as if Nokia needs more problems. As MS and Nokia have little in common, the acquisition was driven by one simple idea: since no phone OEM wants to bother with MS's expensive Phone OS when Android is free, let's buy a phone OEM and order him to use MS OS! Can you imagine anything more anti-market than that? Well, it's possible, of course, that eventually MS Phone becomes more attractive than Android or Tizen, but cost-wise you can't beat free - and MS needs royalties to pay salaries to their 100K workers. Why in the world did MS choose to compete with a totally free product that is produced by a large company that finances the project from completely separate funds, and for their own reason? That game is very hard to win, and MS is many years behind the leaders (it translates to millions of "apps" that are available for iOS and Android.)
“MS products aren’t getting any better. Last years of Ballmer’s reign were a disaster of epic proportions; he was that close to killing the company.”
The company made record profits under the guy, despite 24/7 caterwauling from All of the Linux loons, Apple fanatics, and Android devotees that bash every single product and service that company has ever put out as being the worse thing ever created in the history of mankind.
I mean that was the longest screed of nonsense I’ve ever read about that company. It’s like listening to Democrats talk about the Tea Party.
Good grief! Figures...everything bummer touches turns to poop...
And the people at the companybeing bought out are always the ones to go.
Just wait until those folks go searching for insurance. My hope is that they all voted for Obama.
Remember how the coyote runs past the end of the cliff, pauses in the air, and looks down? MS was very close to that situation. Otherwise you'd have to accept that Ballmer, the geniusest genius of all times, was "pushed" by the board to leave for no good reason. And you'd have to accept that the new people in charge at MS are foolish in their rush to undo the mistakes of Windows 8. Was the MS leadership wrong back then, or is it wrong now? It can't be "neither," but - for MS haters - it can be "both" :-)
I personally believe that Win7 was the best Windows OS ever. Win8 has a lot of good things under the hood, like very fast startup/shutdown times. However the ugly, counterproductive and inconsistent GUI (two control panels?) is killing the adoption rate. A marriage of the Win8 kernel and the Aero of Win7 would do wonders. Flat, pastel-colored, crude decorations of windows are easy to explain - MS wanted to reduce the GPU load, so that Windows can run on a tablet. But excuse me, this here PC is not lacking in the shaders department! Let the desktop be a desktop, and experiment with tablet GUI on tablets. Isn't that what everyone - except MS - does?
Right. This layoff includes 12,500 for the Nokia acquisition. MSFT under new direction has already started pivoting and becoming more open. The Office iPad apps were a great start.
Average MSFT comp is $100K so that’s $1.8 billion per year in savings.
I run Win7 in Virtual Box for the one program I use for work that is only available under MS/.NET There is much that is available for free in the open source world. And if you don't like the way it works you can make it better.
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Freedom ≠ Free Stuff☭ |  |
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I had the same issues with Unity, and I abandoned Ubuntu Desktop in favor of Mint/KDE. "From Freedom Came Elegance" - very apt [-get.] Ubuntu maintainers were told more than once that Unity is not needed or wanted. Unfortunately, it was pushed through for about the same reasons that foisted Metro|Modern upon hapless Windows users.
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