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Ask Slashdot: How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?
An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, word came down that Microsoft was starting to lay off some 18,000 workers. As of June 5th, Microsoft reported a total employee headcount of 127,005, so they're cutting about 15% of their jobs. That's actually a pretty huge percentage, even taking into account the redundancies created by the Nokia acquisition. Obviously, there's an upper limit to how much of your workforce you can let go at one time, so I'm willing to bet Microsoft's management thinks thousands more people aren't worth keeping around. How many employees does Microsoft realistically need? The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management. But they also have a huge number of software projects, and some of the projects, like Windows and Office, need big teams to develop. How would we go about estimating the total workforce Microsoft needs? (Other headcounts for reference: Apple: 80,000, Amazon: 124,600, IBM: 431,212, Red Hat: 5,000+, Facebook: 6,800, Google: 52,000, Intel: 104,900.)
42
64 should be enough for every company
Because 64k is enough !
If you have a business division that you want to maintain, then there's a limit to how many you can get rid of. But Microsoft are clearly closing divisions. They are closing their x-box spin off TV studios, so all those staff can go. Clearly there are large chunks of Nokia that they want to close, likely maintaining the hardware designers but if you're in Nokia marketing, or Symbian/Android software development your coat is on a shoogly nail as they say in Scotland. Similarly, it looks like Nokia manufacturing will also be outsourced, so there are thousands more jobs that will go.
Inside Microsoft is a bit different. From what I've read, it looks like there will be some streamlining of management, so some layers of management will be cut. Most people on here will have seen how management can breed more management, so this is a pretty typical corporate response. Unfortunately for the managers losing their job it may be harder to find a new job. Where a division closes there's always the possibility of a sale to a competitor or some form of management buy out.
How many H1-B visas are they requesting?
fire everybody hire contractors
What the fuck do you want us to do? Know every single details about that company and come back with a definite number of employees it needs? Nobody here can do that.
What a shitty submission.
It would be nice if they just had one person in the company who can see that Windows 8.1 and metro are a piece of shit and is in a position to get rid of them.
Windows is currently unusable on the desktop.
About half of Apple's employees are retail employees (working in Apple stores). Only about 40,000 work as developers, testers, etc.
Apple's 2013 10-K Annual Report states
"As of September 28, 2013, the Company had approximately 80,300 full-time equivalent employees and an additional 4,100 full-time equivalent temporary employees and contractors. Approximately 42,800 of the total full-time equivalent employees worked in the Company’s Retail segment."
My son is certified as a Microsoft Architect and at one point in his career was a senior Microsoft executive. He described the upper levels as very political. There was little team spirit.There was a lot of jockeying for position, backstabbing and attempts to degrade people to to elevate yourself. He eventually left and started his own company (which is doing quite well. He just bought a 40' RV)
... enough to deprive potential competitors of necessary human resources.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
and scaling back XBox. The CEO more or less said he wanted to cut XBox because it wasn't profitable enough, and Nokia is a no-brainer. Microsoft lost the smart phone/tablet war big, and they've probably got redundancies to eliminate.
The part that I'm wondering about is with these new, ultra efficient companies that merge up like crazy how much work is there going to be for the rest of us to do? Between that an automation it just looks like we're running out of work to do..
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This week, I got a real WTF when dealing with Microsoft products and the amazing amount of redundancy that is possible in the company.
We have a robot product that we can communicate to using Bluetooth SPP and we are creating an application that can control it remotely. We originally went with a serial interface (after pairing, recording the "com#" of the device and then passing it to our application), this is somewhat cumbersome so we wanted to pair from our app and connect directly (saving the user from doing those operations manually).
Logically, this would be one set of APIs, but it seems there are five depending on the OS - the only ones that are common are for Vista/Win7. I would think that right here there are four teams that are redundant - pick a single, consistent API, add it in Service Packs for all supported OSes and assign one team to the job.
I would expect there are many more examples out there of similar inefficiencies that somebody within Microsoft should be able to answer with the ability to make things easier for developers and make developers available for squishing bugs.
Sorry about the rant, but standard IO interface APIs should be just that, standard.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Step 1 : Fire the entire marketing department, as well as most of the sales staff.
Step 2 : Simplify the organizational structure so that the lowest employee only has 3 bosses (at most) between him and the CEO, so the entire company is no more than 4 levels deep.
Step 3 : Nobody outside the engineering department should have input towards new features, which bugs get fixed, etc. Fire anyone else who does.
Step 4 : ???
Step 5 : Redemption, renewed respect from the tech world, victory and profits.
This guy can sell anything! Even Reversi and Windows 8!
Too bad he's gone now.
Because how would anyone here have a clue?
I work concurrently in a large company (45,000 employees) and a small company (50-ish, but for years we were in the 5-8 range). I am solidly convinced that the larger a company gets, the higher the number of excess employees.
How do I work concurrently in both companies? My primary employer is the small company, but the large company has subcontracted me via my primary employer to work in their HQ 3 days a week because a specific department (which my primary employer specializes in) is swamped, or so they say. So, 3 days a week I work at the big place with very little to do and end up doing a small amount of work and lots of web browsing or reading or working remotely as I'm able on tasks for the small company. And then 2 days a week I'm at the small company, swamped and playing catch-up.
Granted, this is but one example, but the contrast I see on a daily basis is stunning. Even in my smaller employer I see us getting more inefficiencies and "dead weight" employees. Back when our employee count was in the single digits, it was a whole different ballgame. We were small. We didn't have the resources to carry extra employees. When someone would quit, it was a huge deal because we'd be losing literally like a sixth of our entire workforce. And it was a fun environment! It truly felt like a tightly connected team.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I've been employed at the small company for 16 years and have no desire to leave. But to get back to the original question, the bigger a company gets, the more dead weight they'll carry until the times get really tough. Then, you'll see where they can cut the fat.
Here's an example. A few decades ago, the Rock Island railroad was a well-known railroad across the Midwest. They went bankrupt in about 1980 if memory serves. Leading up to their insolvency, they ended up leading the industry in getting down to a 2-person train crew because they simply had no money to pay additional crew members. From what I've heard, managers literally told train crews "Tough luck, you get an engineer and a conductor because we can't afford to pay for a brakeman." And now the industry standard is a 2-person train crew.
Aside from Microsoft, a FAR better question would be (not to turn this political, but it's a fair question): "How many employees does $government really need?"
Where am I going with this? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm rambling because I'm bored. :)
"The company is famous for its huge teams that don't work together well, and excessive middle management." Can you guess which one causes the other?
... For the given area, are they embracing, extending, or extinguishing the relevant technology? Embracing requires a few talking heads. Extending requires acquisitions and/or development staff. Extinguishing... well, we're seeing the final results of that here....
Perhaps Slashdot needs some new blood so they stop posting the same MS bashing stupid troll posts in order to milk pageviews. It's a major turn off on this site.
This space for rent.
I heard on NPR this morning that, other than Nokia/mobile overlap, the biggest areas of layoff were in middle management. If so, then layoffs may be the correct thing to do. The same report said that Microsoft was increasing hiring in areas. If, for argument's sake, Microsoft got rid of 75k bureaucrats (middle managers, asst department heads, etc.), and replace those with 50k engineers and architects, and a reasonable number of project manager types (who can actually manage projects and do more than cover their own ass), they will be moving in the correct direction
Over 9000!
The Nokia aquisition added 25k to their roster and they are cutting 18k. So why all the big hupla?
Just a rule of thumb I've seen in the lower end of the tech market to stay profitable. At $100B revenue (per year), that's 200K employees. At 110K employees, they're around 900K per employee, which is great.
The CEO and the guy to manage all the offshore people in India.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
does IBM have 400k employees? is the count ~300k for temp staff?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I work concurrently in a large company (45,000 employees) and a small company (50-ish, but for years we were in the 5-8 range). I am solidly convinced that the larger a company gets, the higher the number of excess employees.
certainly large companies have more excess employees, after all the are larger and if only 10% of a company's employees are excess then, using your example, one has 45k and the other 5 excess employees. I suspect the percentage is larger at large companies because it is easy to hide employees and hire, rathe than layoff, staff.
What is the right number of employees? It depends; largely on their revenue generating ability.I've worked at companies where if an employee was billable 65% of the time everyone was happy. I've worked projects where I did 20 hours of work and 40 of free time and that was fine because we still had huge margins. Not having the staff to put on projects costs more than keeping them around so they can work high margin jobs. I've worked at big companies and small ones and in defense of big ones is when you need resources to throw at project they have them; whereas small ones often don't.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I bet you're working for the large company today :)
If they really wanted to do what was right for the stock holders, they should acknowledge that they've got an incredibly lucrative income stream from a gradually dying product line. They should milk the Windows/Office franchise for everything they can, while cutting down development which only at this point enrages customers who have to spend big bucks on migration costs.
Cut everything way back, and send every penny you make straight back to the stock holders (i.e. an Income Trust).
MS Stock would instantly become the hottest income stock on the market. "Hey, we're *not* going to blow every penny we've made for the last 30 years in a futile attempt to stave off the end of our industry. We're just going to make you very, very wealthy!"
MS is sitting on the world's most profitable oil field. There's no shame in acknowledging that it won't last forever - just exploit it as profitably (i.e. cheaply) as possible and give the money to the stock holders.
Consider the history of major software projects, and how many employees were required. BSD unix was a university project, developed by faculty and students. Linux was developed initially by one person, and then a relatively small team. NeXT was developed by a fairly small team over a relatively small amount of time. Mac OSX was basically the NeXT system ported over to the Mac platform; at the time, Apple had about a tenth of the employees of Microsoft, and was under significant financial stress. iOS and the iPhone were developed by a very small team within Apple (20+ employees if I am not mistaken). The interesting thing is that all of these systems have displayed remarkable stability and security. This likely has something to do with the fact that these OS's are all unix derived. However I find it interesting that such excellent products did not require large numbers of programmers to develop.
Contrast the above with the offerings of Microsoft over recent years. Most especially consider Vista, Win7 and Win8. During the development of these systems, Microsoft had a huge number of excellent programmers. Why did it take them so long to develop these operating system versions? Why has MS had such difficulty porting over to different processor architectures, such as ARM? Apple has had no such difficulty, porting OSX/ iOS from PowerPC to Intel to ARM. I believe that a fundamental cause of the difficulties that MS has experience with Windows lies in the early stages of operating system development. Whereas the systems based on Unix were built on a solid and proven foundation from their earliest versions, Microsoft has from a very early stage shown a tendency to build its own early versions on its own unproven architecture, with the intention of fixing the significant problems later.
Early versions of Windows 95 had very limited networking protocols, that were intended for home networking only. Wide area networking was added as an afterthought. Contrast this with unix variants, which are based on an architecture that grew up in an environment of university main-frames with hostile tinkering computer science students vying to break the system.
Anyone who worked with Windows 95 can attest to the buggy mess that it was. I supported people using it, and I remember the problems. User says, "my system crashed so I rebooted it. It still didn't work so I rebooted it again. It still didn't solve the problem." Tech guy responds, "well there's your problem. Tap the computer twice, pray to the god of your choice, and reboot it a third time, and it should be fixed."
Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8 all originate from that same architecture, right down to the fact that they all share the engineering disaster that is "the registry". How can Windows ever be truly solid when it is built on such a bad foundation. I believe that the reason why Microsoft has had such difficulty building a solid OS stems from this weak foundation. It explains why it took MS many years and a staff 10x that of Apple to build the marvel that was Vista. As Mythbusters showed, it is possible to polish a turd. However it takes a lot of effort. And in the end, you still only finish with a polished turd.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
640k should be enough for anybody.
Microsoft isn't really laying off these people. They just expect they will come back and code for free and for the love of coding as they launch the development of Windows OPEN. Coming soon to sourceforge.com.
It seems to me that anyone who says this, I synthesized our strategic direction..., is utterly incompetent at coordinating a large group. That is unthinking corporate-speak. It communicates non-verbally that he has no understanding of what is needed.
..."
More:
"... realign our workforce..."
"... work toward synergies and strategic alignment..."
"... drive greater accountability..."
"... become more agile and move faster."
"... fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways,
"... flattening organizations..."
"... increasing the span of control of people managers."
"... our business processes and support models will be more lean and efficient with greater trust between teams."
Comment: Corporate-speak does not build trust, it destroys trust.
"... more productive, impactful teams..."
"Each organization is starting at different points and moving at different paces."
Comment: That is utterly obvious.
"We will realize the synergies..."
"... align to Microsoft's strategic direction."
"... we will focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens..."
"... builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space..."
"... aligns with our focus..."
I'm very interested in the sociology of this. My understanding is that the Microsoft board of directors is utterly incompetent, has little understanding of technology, and merely chose the person to be CEO who was consistently most pleasant and ingratiating.
A competent CEO would not announce a huge advancement until it was already accomplished.
The sweeping changes Satya Nadella is announcing require huge amounts of research and understanding. It is simply not possible to accomplish successfully a re-organization of a huge company as though it were one action.
A competent top coordinator would announce a little at a time and provide meaningful and detailed explanation about why each change was necessary, and how decisions were made.
A competent top coordinator would make it clear that much of the wisdom of ideas about changes came from other people inside the company.
My opinions.
Hmmm, how'd you guess? :)
A mass layoff would normally be a tragic thing for the employees. However, these are people with programming experience from a top tier computer company. With all the recent reports of the huge need for more coders, they should have no trouble getting new jobs. RIGHT?
Because they don't need any of the former, but low and behold, a half million of the latter.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
The good: quick execution: rumors/announcement/termination within days. Good severance package. Layoffs timed so that outgoing employees receive bonuses and vested stock. Alignment with business strategy: smaller teams of engineers, less process, more dev-focus.
The bad: layoff by algorithm, a lot of surprises in who got laid off and who got to stay. Management not aware of coming layoffs until the day of termination. Some opportunities to cut parasitic orgs not realized. Morale impacted.
just that last one to turn out the light. At least for the mobile division.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
How Many Employees Does Microsoft Really Need?
With any luck, no more than is necessary to shut the doors and turn out the lights.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
How many programs could a microsoft programmer program if a microsoft programmer could program programs?
HP has over 317,000 employees, thanks in large part to acquisitions - Microsoft is no different here.
Lots of redundancies can be eliminated (unfortunately for those employees) - and in some ways, this is a very bad thing. As monopolies grow, they are able to be more efficient and eliminate jobs. We don't stop and think about the fact that in a massive conglomerate corporation place once stood several competing corporations that meant competition (lower prices, better service to consumers) and more jobs - but of course, less return to investors and less pay to executives.
This is a troubling trend, as the American Dream is snuffed and the middle class finds itself dwindling deeper into poverty, while the richest seem to work tirelessly to increase that gap. I'm no socialist or communist, but it occurred to me the goal of these assholes wasn't to get richer - that's something that happens when you are that rich anyway - it is to make the rest of us poorer.
... to close the door on the way out
mod me funny
How many employees does the US Govt really need.
I'm not sure including Amazon in the list is a reasonable comparison. Their numbers will be boosted by all the shelf pickers. Same with Apple and their retail stores - it's a different kind of business (OK, perhaps MS have some stores, but I doubt anything like as many). Some tasks are just more labour intensive (at least until Amazon perfects their robot pickers!)
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
In modern corporate thinking, the answer is two - the CEO, and a flunky to fetch coffee and do any actual work the CEO should be doing. Every other position should be either automated or outsourced.
I like to think of it as "Silting up"... big companies with little apparent strategic direction tend to lose their most talented employees to 'churn'... The least talented employees have fewer options so they stay put marking time.. They become silt..
I work for a medium-large organization (a few thousand people worldwide, nothing like a Microsoft or IBM.) Both very small and very large organizations have problems. Small businesses are usually run by a tyrannical owner and their family, and all others are treated like "the help". Large organizations develop their own political infrastructure, and yes, they collect a lot of unnecessary employees. I'm not sure which is the bigger problem.
When things get too big, there are some people who get very good at either (a) hiding out and not doing a whole lot, or (b) taking advantage of the size of the organization and slowly building empires around themselves. I'm on a very small (way too small for the amount of actual, real customer work we do) product engineering team and am sometimes amazed at how easily some other groups within our company can just ask for and receive more headcount. Good politicians do very well in large organizations. In addition, there are simply a lot of jobs that involve processes that could be automated, but for whatever reason they're not. How many large-company employees do you know that simply take an input stack of work, perform some sort of transaction on it, and pass it on to the next person in the chain? A lot of this is probably holdover from when companies actually did have thousands of people manually processing paper and requests.
Also, in large organizations with long-term employees, it's very easy for the employees to get wrapped up in the organizational procedures themselves. I have a lot of friends who work for the state university system and in local governments, and they tell me all sorts of stories about people throwing fits over the number of sick days they have banked, etc. just because it's a very important part of their work culture. There's a lot of bureaucracy just for the sake of it, and long-term employees use "the system" to maximum advantage. The problem is that it distracts from the actual work that needs to be done.
I'm not really sure we _should_ get rid of every single inefficient position, for one simple reason...these office jobs keep a huge chunk of middle class with reasonable skills and medium levels of education employed. Take those out everywhere and suddenly millions of people start defaulting on their debts and the economy collapses. In that case, either (a) the economy reorganizes around a Star Trek The Next Generation model, or (b) we start seeing some really bad stuff happening in the near future. Losing manufacturing was bad -- imagine what happens when millions more have nowhere to go and nothing to do.
That said, try to get a bug fixed or feature added in Windows or Office...it's not easy and I think I know part of the reason. :-)
Stephen Elop is somehow hanging on and getting promoted, despite turning Nokia from a one time cellphone powerhouse into a shell of an IP holding company, and finally into MSFT's redheaded stepchild. See Om Malik's take
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Source: http://investors.redhat.com/fa... Disclaimer: I work there.
As has been pointed out already, the "How many employees does MS need?" question is ridiculous, as there's no way ANY of us here is qualified to give even an approximate answer that's not just a complete guess.
That said, it *is* possible to talk specifics and point out areas where improvement is needed.
The last I heard, Microsoft had an internal structure where those developing new applications weren't the ones responsible for debugging them. They just spit out the code, and another team would have to fix/clean it up. To me, that makes absolutely NO sense, as the people best qualified to get a program running right are the ones who wrote it in the first place! I've heard that's one of the things that's going to change to improve efficiency, and if true -- I sure hope so, even if it means laying some people off.
I also understand that finally, the Mac and the Windows Office developers have been instructed to work as a team -- vs. treating the Mac Office developers as an isolated group in the company. (That *may* have been originally done based on a silly interpretation of the financials, vs. any true benefit to the development of the code? I remember the Mac division of Microsoft once bragging that it earned the highest profit margin of any division in the company, per employee hired -- simply because it was such a small team.)
I will say I find it telling that even Intel corporation has over 20,000 fewer employees than Microsoft does, right now. I can't really imagine that chip development and sales by the world leader in that area would require less manpower than Microsoft needs to sell and support some of the code people can run on those chips?
I was a network manager at a large-ish company and took a job at a smaller consulting company.
I work much harder at the small company than I did at the large company. The only time I worked harder at the large company was when doing large, time-sensitive projects (ie, get to pause/finish stage or network is broken).
The upside of the large company workload was that I think I my knowledge was much higher resolution, because I had time to focus and dig into details. At the consulting job, I have much more experiential knowledge but very little time to focus on details.
I think there's an old joke:
Q: "How many people work at Microsoft?"
a: "About 20%"
Granted, this is but one example, but the contrast I see on a daily basis is stunning. Even in my smaller employer I see us getting more inefficiencies and "dead weight" employees. Back when our employee count was in the single digits, it was a whole different ballgame. We were small. We didn't have the resources to carry extra employees. When someone would quit, it was a huge deal because we'd be losing literally like a sixth of our entire workforce.
I think you answered your own question in a sense. When your company was small, the culture was that every employee was very valuable and getting rid of someone just wasn't an option. People were accountable because they didn't want to let the team down. They could see how important they were. It was obvious every time a coworker took a week off for vacation.
When a company gets bigger, it has to shed the notion that every person is absolutely valuable and needed. Equally important is spending effort on making people feel important and cultivating a culture of "I don't want to let down my team". If you don't do something about it, that small-company culture will erode, and it seems like that is exactly what is happening.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
One advantage of being laid off by Microsoft. When the crappy job ad asks for the impossible, such as "5+ years experience with Windows 8", a former MS employee can actually claim to have that experience!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"Tough luck, you get an engineer and a conductor because we can't afford to pay for a brakeman." And now the industry standard is a 2-person train crew.
The industry standard is a 2-person train crew because of FRED, who dates approximately from the 1980s. Another case of automation eliminating jobs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One to hold the lightbuld and 51,213 to turn the Redmond campus.
Bill Brasky!
When I joined Microsoft in 1995, they had 18,000 employees. That was enough for Servers and Tools, Windows and Office.
When I left Microsoft in 2000 after four and a half years there (hint hint), they had 42,000 employees. That was enough for Servers and Tools, Windows and Office - including web treatment of those products.
Today, Microsoft makes its money from Servers and Tools, Windows and Office, breaks even on hardware and loses a bunch on web operations. It seems to me that they could lop off about two thirds of the company and carry on. They missed the web and they missed mobile. All that bloat is very possibly a result of trying to figure out how to make money in those two areas. So reset, admit that you don't know how to compete in this brave new world, get back to Microsoft of old and then figure out how to reinvent yourself going forward.
Note that I was a software engineer in Servers and Tools, not management. That's why I can concoct ivory tower fantasies like this.
Most people just call that the Dead Sea Effect.
I worked for some time for one of the largest companies in the world during its biggest growth period. We had about 40,000 employees when I joined and about 15 years later we had about 120k. Honestly, we didn't really do anything significantly different production wise at the end that we weren't doing that the beginning, perhaps 10k of those extra 80k employees contributed to an actual increase in delivered products and services.
At the beginning a department was generally a manager who reported to a VP or GM, they had 5-6 managers under them and each manager had 6-12 employees. Those first line managers were responsible for making decisions and accountable for the results. About half the company was in manufacturing or customer support of some kind.
What we had at the end were lots and lots of meetings with lots and lots of people who all wanted a vote. Ownership and accountability were all over the place. Perhaps 3-5 people were all doing the job that one FLM was doing at the beginning. We had a ton of process and paperwork. Lots and lots of middle management. There were now as many as 7-8 layers between a first line manager and a GM or VP. That's another thing. I think we had about 9 or 10 VP's at the start and we had about 50 of them towards the end. We spent millions, even billions on things we really had no core competency on and then abandoned them when the people running them realized the quagmire they were in was about to go over their heads. We got further and further away from profitable products and services.
Then we took a seriously wrong turn innovation-wise (like we didn't do any for a while, just insisted on doing the same stuff we'd always done, the way we'd always done it) and we almost had our lunch eaten by a far less capable competitor. We lost or laid off about 30,000 employees in just a few years. Unfortunately many of them were the talented people who just didn't need to deal with uncertainty or bureaucracy anymore. Miraculously, a small group of employees coughed up a major innovation and we got back into the game and came back gangbusters. The company has such a commanding lead in the market they're in and are so efficient at manufacturing that really nobody else can profit in the segment so they'll maintain inertia for at least another 3-5 years, maybe more.
The company is still doing well, but frankly even at current employee levels you could take another 20-30k of the middle management and redundant "stakeholders" out to the parking lot, tar and feather them and not allow them back into the building ever again and absolutely nothing bad would happen. As long as you held onto the manufacturing, IT, customer service, engineering and about 50 marketing/PR people, things would go at least as well.
We worked with Microsoft a lot and I met regularly with their execs and senior management. They have pretty much the same disease. A long in the tooth cash cow that turns out money like a broken ATM and management that's sure all of that is due to their guidance and genius. Extreme narcissism and an ivory tower that goes to the moon. Most of the key decision makers and innovators are probably mired down in 7.5 hours of meetings a day and spend the other hour and a half doing e-mail and writing progress reports. Once they wander too far away from the cash cow, they burn through money and get nowhere. They absolutely fit the saying "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Its all about "how do we stuff Windows into it, and lets just try to do the same things that others already squeezed the profit out of, whether there is a real strategy there or if it even fits into anything we have any competence in".
So I'd say that with their current reasonable and profitable product set, they probably need around 65k-70k employees. I don't think at this point that they really have any valid position in the hardware business. The mobile market blew past them 3+ years ago. They might make 4th or 5th in the ecosystem business if they tried hard. They could easily be pushed right out of business in under 5 years.
As a side note. The announcement of the huge Microsoft layoffs come one week after Bill Gates calls for more imported labor.
Break the Immigration Impasse
By SHELDON G. ADELSON, WARREN E. BUFFETT and BILL GATESJULY 10, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/sheldon-adelson-warren-buffett-and-bill-gates-on-immigration-reform.html?_r=0
BINGO!!!!!!!
I win. Too bad a bunch of ex-Nokia folks and Microsofties had to lose though.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I've also found that sadly enough, there are plenty of people around a big company who are really good at appearing essential, while really doing nothing themselves and in fact are very good at creating work for others. Unfortunately they also tend to get retained through job cuts, because they appear so essential.
Though I work in a big company we generally manged to have a small, well-focused team. That makes it a good place to work, as long as you can keep your head down, have fun, and not see the chaos and decay around you.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
not a weakness. Microsoft does this is a) to maintain backwards compatibility (which locks businesses in since they'd have to re-purchase or re-write tons of software) and b) to fix bugs and work around limitations in other vendor's software ( again, lock in ).
:).
In office there's something called the 80/20 rule. 80% of your customers only use 20% of your features, but it's a _different_ 20% for just about every customer. There's always 1 feature a customer can't live without. That's what keeps 'em locked in
The danger from dropping rarely used features and picking just one way to do things is that you'll force your users to spend lots of money switching over to the 1 way you picked, and they'll start asking if they should look for alternatives.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
= X (to develop the software) + y (to screw the customers)
Anybody else they layoff is just gravy after that.
None.
I wish they'd just collapse and die already.
For a moment I was worried that Dilbert cartoon craziness was falling behind real-world craziness. I'm relieved that Dilbert is still ahead:
Most of us are only pretending to work while secretly hoping the project gets canceled after you get fired by the board.
Dilbert is not accurate, I think, about Microsoft. For Microsoft, the 6th panel,
"I expect the decline in morale to lead to violence"
should be
"I expect the decline in morale to lead to more decline in morale."
There are fewer than 90,000 US employees. The vast bulk of all IBM employees is in India. And as far as those 90K US employees is concerned IBM is phenomenally overstaffed with middle managers and 'program managers' who's only job is to report on the status of status reporting reporting via enormous spreadsheets and multi hundred slide Powerpoints. IBM is a company that wants to cut costs to prosperity and eventually they will have no workers and only a few hundred lawyers and accountants reporting to executives and they will finally get their way.
...that Bill Gates says we desperately need .
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
They probably only need just TWO employees, a CEO to get the money, and a secretary to collect it.
Every single action Microsoft makes is met with incessant criticism. This makes a lot of sense as for two decades the Microsoft marketing machine has firmly established this universal notion that anything different than Windows is scary, different, and OMG, *incompatible*. That worked very so well as no Windows user wants anything different than what they have right now.
So, all Microsoft should do is just keep printing copies of Windows XP, since that what everyone wants, and just keep collecting the money. Users would be a LOT happier as they would never have to worry about any change, and the CEO would be happy as he can just keep collecting the money with no effort.
5 employees, after Microsoft transforms itself into a roofing company. They will do less damage that way.
Chairman, CEO, CFO, CIO, Executive VP of Sales and Marketing and Executive VP of something to do with engaging the outsourcing suppliers with the starving peasants working 80+ hours a week for a pittance in undeveloped countries.
Stick Men
640K ought to be enough.
Any more than that would make it Megasoft.
By standard and by law, a "k" is x1000, an "M" is x1,000,000, and so on, and NOTHING else. Standards groups like IEC and IEEE are unanimous: they ALWAYS mean a power of 10. There have already been a number of court cases where someone used "K" etc. to mean binary prefixes, and every time they have had to concede (and typically end up paying up in out-of-court settlements). Examples include Willem Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Company and Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.
And don't tell me that computers "always" use base 2 measurements. Hard disk drives, clock cycles, and bandwidth are typically measured using base-10 prefixes (multipliers of 10^3). Yes, RAM has been traditionally been measured using prefixes that imply powers of 2, but the errors have been getting worse and worse as the numbers get larger.
Technologists should care about being precise. If you can't tell what a number means, that is a problem. The binary prefixes are a nice solution to a widespread problem. If you don't care about precision, use whatever term you want. But when you want to measure accurately, use the right units.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Don't be jelly, bro!
everybody who thinks it's a great idea to make the desktop function like a cheap-ass $99 phone with 8 gig of memory... OUT! OUT ON A RAIL! INTO THE FLAMING PIT!!!
not that I'm biased or anything, but HULK HATE 8!!!!!!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
They need 3 employees
1 To cancel the recurring pizza delivery order
1 To hit the start button to stop the computer.
1 To turn out the lights
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Zero, as they close up shop.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I wish
See the chart here: http://automattic.com/work-wit...
Granted there are many people who contribute to the WordPress ecosystem who don't formally work for Automattic given the FOSS nature of WordPress and related plugins. It's just a very different 21st century way of doing business compared to the 20th century Microsoft model, and is doing a better job of bridging the exchange and gift economies (like I talk about on my site).
Automattic, which shepherds the core of WordPress, sounds like a great place to work for people like me who are comfortable working from home. The future for WordPress looks pretty amazing, especially given ever better JSON/AJAX RESTful support for JavaScript-powered frontend apps. See also: ..."
http://inside.envato.com/the-f...
"For those willing to ignore the prevailing opinions in the programming community, Tom Willmot says that WordPress presents developers with incredible opportunities, and a wonderful sense of community:
I've been looking at shifting my own "Pointrel" and "Twirlip" projects, my wife's "Rakontu" and "NarraCat" projects and other similar work (stuff related to participative narrative inquiry, civic sensemaking, public intelligence, social semantic desktop tools, educational simulations, and more) to have JavaScript frontends that use WordPress as an application server backend (rather than have them run stand-alone). That would make it easy for millions of WordPress users who might want such tools to install them as a WordPress plugin with a couple clicks. As Alan Kay said about Squeak, getting people to install anything to try it is hard. Other benefits would include easy authentication support. I expect more and more projects by other people will be moving in that direction. I'm tempted to apply to work at Automattic myself at some point given their FOSS focus. They are also hiring as they got a bunch of venture financing recently. But I would want to make at least a demo of that integration first. I plan on putting such a demo here when it works: http://twirlip.com/
Of course, JavaScript has problems (globals by default), PHP has problems (such a long list..), and WordPress has problems (no doubt), with many problems coming from their historical roots and a need for backward-compatibility. But I can't deny all three won some battle for mindshare for whatever reasons (especially ease of initial use), and when you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? :-) Like Manuel De Landa wrote in "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces", a uniformity on one level can often in turn support a diversity on a level above it.
See also on the value of having a diversity of programmers of a variety of experience levels in an organization:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
What I especially envision is that all those millions of WordPress sites could start talking to each other in interesting ways... See also Theodore Sturgeon's 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" for where it all might lead...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
Or as I reprise here:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org...
"Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against [that]?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
A well managed company would be continuously evaluating employees and their work and making adjustments to personnel requirements every month
Microsoft used to be very picky of whom they hire
A legendary (remain un-named) programmer that I know was interviewed by Microsoft back in the mid 1980's but was rejected because at that time Microsoft puts a lot of effort to hire people who can contribute to what they had in mind
That legedary programmer later went on to join Id Software and developed some awesome pixel routine for them, and what he did in Id impressed Intel so much that they hired him to help them in their Larrabee project
But Microsoft changed into a totally different company after Bill Gates stepped down --- and it started to take in all kinds of useless code monkeys (and many more who can't even code!) under their payroll
I have been in the industry for decades and have witness how the companies changed after the founders have left
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
43
MS was overloaded with Project Managers when I worked there. Our team had 12! Project managers (and 5 managers) yet the team doing the actual work was made up of 15 people.
One CEO, One Spin Doctor.
They need one guy from India to fire all the others.
Explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
1 employee + thousands of wage slaves
Casteism