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Finnish Government Criticizes Microsoft For Job Cuts, 'Broken Promises' (softpedia.com)
jones_supa writes: Softpedia reports: "Microsoft has recently announced a new round of job layoffs at its Mobile unit in Finland, as it moves forward with its restructuring and reorganization plan following the acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services unit. The Finnish government has criticized Microsoft for turning to more job cuts in the country, pointing out that the company has a huge responsibility to help those who are being let go. Microsoft's latest job cut round included 1,850 people, 1,350 of which are said to be working in Finland. 'I am disappointed because of the (initial) promises made by Microsoft,' Finance Minister Alexander Stubb was quoted as saying by Reuters. 'One example is that the data center did not materialize despite the company's promise.'" He refers to Microsoft's promise in 2013 to invest $250 million in a data center located in Finland that was specifically meant to provide services to European customers. All of these worries are not unfounded as the employment situation in Finland is still quite terrible, and the decline of Nokia's former phone business certainly exacerbates the situation.
Microsoft is a large corporation. They could have made an investment in a new direction using these people. Layoffs are just the quick and easy out.
They didn't have to buy Nokia in the first place. They completely wasted the resource and all their investors money for no net return because they never really wanted to be a phone company, it was just a bullet point on the "How do we measure compared to Google and Apple" powerpoint slide.
It would be nice if corporations saw people as the resources they are rather than just expendable cogs. It's not the workers fault Microsoft's board of directors couldn't figure out how to run a phone division.
If Nokia had instead become a generic Android phone shifter, their profit margins would have gone way down, and there is no way they could have continued to support such a large workforce, and they certainly would not need Symbian developers. There is no realistic scenario where these people would have kept their jobs. Microsoft certainly accelerated the implosion, but they were not the root cause.
The point is exactly that Nokia was _not_ trying to be a generic Android phone shifter, but the third contender (or fourth considering RIM) with Meego. Obviously they did not need all those Symbian developers, that's why they bought Qt and made a deal with Intel and the Linux Foundation over a Linux system for mobile devices and then hired a lot of MeeGo developers. Since MeeGo was designed to make a smooth transition from Symbian, there was indeed a realistic scenario where those people would have kept their jobs: the success of MeeGo. And since MeeGo could capitalize on the success of Symbian (it still had a 30% market share in early 2011), it had more chances at succeeding than WP.