Well that’s exactly what is taking place.
I know lots of people desperately want to say “This is because M$ is crap, and they are going out of business” or some other nonsense. But everyone has known for months that acquiring Nokia will lead to redundant staff being let go.
yeah....they got Apple iPhone fever instead of sticking to where their strengths were. Regardless, BLS will not include these people in their weekly numbers. It just will not happen. Too many lies are at stake.
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.)
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.