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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.
Yet our phone success has been limited to companies valuing our commitment to security,..."
Think I found your problem right there.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
...free upgrades to Windows 10 on all your Windows devices!
...maybe they will stop trying to make the Windows Desktop work like a Windows phone...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
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).
this wall:
http://www.idc.com/prodserv/sm...
should have left many year ago.
The streamlining phase.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't think slashdotters understood the really big news here: for Microsoft IT WAS REALLY A BUSINESS, not a bad joke! :-D
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.
Proverbs 21:19
How long before Microsoft's Windows 10 strategy sees a similar fate because it has angered so many Microsoft customers?
Even if the upgrades were all 100% successful and all of the hardware had proper drivers, it's still an asshole move on Microsoft's part, just to be able to say "Windows 10 recently crossed 300 million monthly active devices" to the press.
Microsoft committed suicide by refusing to give salesmen a spiff for selling Windows phones. Both Apple and Google give the rank and file at most cell carriers that. That's why if you walk into a T-Mobile or AT&T you'll find the Windows phones in the back behind a fence with barb wire, dogs, a moat and panthers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My Lumia 635 was only $39. You should have tried something cheaper for awhile before committing.
Yet nobody gets upset at Apple for forcing OS upgrades, or Google/Cell phone carriers for forcing OS upgrades on their phones. Everybody loves to whine but MS is just adopting the same model of OS upgrades as their competitors have had for years.
Excuse me, COWARDLY shill; but Apple NEVER forces an Upgrade. NEVER.
My iPad 2 is still running iOS 7. It COULD be running iOS 9.x; but I don't want to upgrade. So I don't.
My MacBook Pro is running OS X 10.9.5 (Mavericks). It COULD be running OS X 10.11.4 (El Capitan); but I don't want to upgrade. So I don't.
Up until yesterday, my iPhone 6 plus was running iOS 8.4; I finally saw something in iOS 9 that I thought was interesting, so I upgraded to iOS 9.3.2. But nothing and nobody forced me to.
Get your facts straight, MS Shill.
And having used both, Google is much better suited for your average user than Microsoft, which seems to think you should need a MIS degree to use O365; Making it harder to use, for no apparent reason.
I went through an O365/Exchange Online migration, which was a bitch to say the least.
I also continue to support them, and I can say unequivocally, that O365 takes more hand holding, more troubleshooting, and causes more hassles for me, as an admin than when we were using Office 2013 and Exchange onPrem.
However, with all that being said, from the users perspective it wasn't much of a change, and no, you don't need an MIS degree to use it.
Outlook, Excel, Word, etc?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
The desktop is dead? Wow, could've fooled me. How many people do you know what "do this cloud thing"? I am dead serious, does ANYONE use that shit as a private user? I'm not talking about company use, I'm not talking about people running some kind of message or image board, I'm talking about Joe Sixpack sitting at home doing his shit.
Unless that is done somehow fully transparent to Joe, he won't even know about it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
MS is on a burning platform.
Now they must jump in the water.
aaaaaaa
"And as long as it has taken the company, Microsoft has still arguably achieved something that its competitors have not... It took more than two decades to get there, but Microsoft still somehow got there first."
Translation: We don't know what we did, bet we did it first.
On another note, such a shame. I still wish they would dump that secure boot crap and let the hobbyist/modding community go to town like they did on WP7. IMHO I think that would do more to attract developers than trying to wave their unified development platform around. Take down the walled garden and let the hobbyist and modders go to town customizing and hacking roms once again.
That's less of a problem than not having supported WIN32 code on Windows RT. They're able to seed Metro into the marketplace by giving away free Windows 10 upgrades - but they can't actually get people to rewrite WIN32 code for Metro when the whole world's moving to either web-based apps or iOS/Android. But if WIN32 code could've been easily ported to Metro, then they'd have stood a chance. They're now trying to make it easy to port Metro stuff to iOS/Android, but there's no Metro stuff to port. If they'd done the same with WIN32, they'd have had to deal with some of the weaknesses of WIN32, but they'd at least have had a huge developer base behind them.
Perhaps if they'd introduced Metro back when Windows 7 was introduced, they could've courted their developer base before iOS and Android got them. But that would've required some foresight - not Microsoft's strong suit...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...