Microsoft Is Laying Off 1,850 to Streamline Its Smartphone Business (theverge.com)

Microsoft is making more changes to its smartphone business. The company, which sold its feature phone business last week, on Wednesday announced that it is scaling back hardware -- laying off 1,850 staff and take a charge of $950 million including $200 million in severance payments in a memo to all employees. The company insists that "great new devices" are in the works. From Myerson's memo: Last week we announced the sale of our feature phone business. Today I want to share that we are taking the additional step of streamlining our smartphone hardware business, and we anticipate this will impact up to 1,850 jobs worldwide, up to 1,350 of which are in Finland. These changes are incredibly difficult because of the impact on good people who have contributed greatly to Microsoft. Speaking on behalf of Satya and the entire Senior Leadership Team, we are committed to help each individual impacted with our support, resources, and respect. For context, Windows 10 recently crossed 300 million monthly active devices, our Surface and Xbox customer satisfaction is at record levels, and HoloLens enthusiasts are developing incredible new experiences. Yet our phone success has been limited to companies valuing our commitment to security, manageability, and Continuum, and with consumers who value the same. Thus, we need to be more focused in our phone hardware efforts.

Comments

That explains alot

[wkwilley2]

Yet our phone success has been limited to companies valuing our commitment to security,..."

Think I found your problem right there.

Re:That explains alot

[Penguinisto]

Indeed... when the frig has *anyone* outside of Redmond admired a Windows-based OS for its --*snicker*-- security?

Re:That explains alot

[bondsbw]

Actually, people who actually know something about security instead of only reading Slashdot commentary.

People who realize that Vista, despite the inevitable hardships and bad reputation that came with breaking drivers and applications, was the result of a tough but vital decision to make some great improvements to security.

People who understand that sandboxing is a powerful security model despite its limitations, one that is not just promoted by Microsoft but also by Apple and even Google to a degree (e.g. Chrome).

Re:That explains alot

[Sir_Eptishous]

People who realize that Vista, despite the inevitable hardships and bad reputation that came with breaking drivers and applications, was the result of a tough but vital decision to make some great improvements to security.

Right, and when did Vista come out? Waaaayyyy too late to put the Genie back in the lamp(or horse in the barn).
Oh, and the chest thumping security techniques that MS likes to brag about post Vista were things that were the norm in most other OS'.
So essentially MS was shamed into even taking security seriously, actually.

Little Wonder...

[Penguinisto]

Are they even growing at this point? I mean, their marketshare isn't much above statistical noise, and even buying Nokia didn't help them much thanks to their demand to re-form it into their vision instantly instead of trying to ship Nokia into shape and introduce their vision slowly into it.

I get their drive to unify mobile+gaming+PC+whatever into one big fat ecosystem, but let's face it - they got into the mobile market way too late, and what moves they did make were either not capitalized on properly (Sidekick), flopped hard (Pink/Kin), or was way too-little/too-late (Nokia).

Maybe it's time for them to instead go back to their roots? It may be too late to un-suck the Windows UI, but at least they can make moves to un-NSA the damned thing and to stop treating their customers like easily-abused chattel... ...nah. Maybe it's better to just let them die. Wish Linux had a wider market, though.

If they streamline it enough...

[VAXcat]

...maybe they will stop trying to make the Windows Desktop work like a Windows phone...

"Windows 10 recently crossed 300 million monthly a

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying, is that it's the most effective virus ever written?

I've now had to reformat about a dozen different systems in the past two weeks because of botched "upgrades". In some cases, the systems didn't roll back properly (why am I being presented with the EULA only after it upgrades?). In other cases the systems were rendered unbootable due to driver issues. I've seen maybe three or four successful upgrades, and even those had to be rolled back because it nuked the ability to use the peripherals attached to the computer.

All this stuff kinda reminds me of the early 2000s where you could get a virus just by plugging an unfirewalled Windows XP system straight into the internet. Within minutes, you'd have something nasty on your computer and critical processes would be crashing left right and center.

Windows 10 seems an awful lot like that. Plug your computer into the internet, wait a while, and suddenly you're infected. Good luck restoring your computer to the former state 100% (without prior system images or other full backups).

Hey, it was a business!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think slashdotters understood the really big news here: for Microsoft IT WAS REALLY A BUSINESS, not a bad joke! :-D

Found the typo

[wcrowe]

It took awhile, but I finally caught the typo. It says their success was "limited to", but what they meant was "limited by". The sentence makes sense after you swap in the correct word.

Re:"Windows 10 recently crossed 300 million monthl

[Rob Y.]

To be fair-ish, the reason for this was to be able to say "windows 10 recently crossed 300 million" to *developers* - who've abandoned Microsoft's roadmap en masse. And they did that largely because Microsoft's roadmap was "throw out your existing WIN32 code and rewrite it for our great new mobile/desktop/xbox platform that nobody uses yet". About 4 years after those same dev's started rewriting their existing WIN32 code the for iOS/Android/web platforms that everybody uses. Now they've bought Xamarin, in an attempt to allow devs to target iOS and Android like they want - and get Windows support 'for free'. Except, again, they're counting on those devs to do yet another rewrite to get support for that platform that nobody uses. There are some real benefits to being able to target iOS and Android from a single code base (to whatever limited extent Xamarin actually enables that), but is that worth starting over?

Burning platform

[stooo]

MS is on a burning platform.
Now they must jump in the water.