Microsoft To Lay Off 700 Employees Next Week, Report Says (geekwire.com)

According to a report by Business Insider (Warning: may be paywalled), Microsoft will cut about 700 jobs in conjunction with its quarterly earnings release next week. GeekWire reports: The latest layoffs are part of the company's previously announced plan to cut about 2,850 roles globally during its current fiscal year, according to the Business Insider report. The company declined to comment this afternoon, but we understand the report to be accurate, based on our own sources. Next week's cuts will be spread across a variety of job functions inside the company. The company's previous job cuts have come in areas including its smartphone business and global sales team. Microsoft announced its largest cuts in July 2014, eliminating 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of the company at the time.

Comments

Re:The death spiral is continuing.

[Grishnakh]

This is some seriously delusional thinking. Microsoft not critical or relevant? What are you smoking?

First off, IBM is still here if you haven't noticed. They got out of PCs, but they still do lots of other stuff and are a huge and profitable company.

But back to MS: they absolutely are critical and relevant, because everyone's PC runs on their software. That isn't going to change, probably ever. If Windows 10 couldn't convince people to dump them, nothing will. They might not have gotten anywhere in mobile devices, but that doesn't matter because they still have their Windows and Office cash cows, and those aren't going anywhere, and there's no threats to them (do you see businesses switching all their workstations to OSX or Linux? Nope).

MS is doing the right thing: cut employees, and cut all long-term investment, and just keep slapping some new lipstick on the Windows and Office pigs. Corporations in particular will happily continue to pay through the nose for MS's enterprise products, and consumers are happy to use Windows 10 with its built-in spyware and advertising which MS makes money from indirectly. MS doesn't need to invest long-term, they just need to keep milking their cash cows. They can do this indefinitely, because the whole Windows 10 experience has proven, without a doubt, that customers simply will not leave that platform no matter what, and no matter how much it costs them.

Re:The death spiral is continuing.

[phantomfive]

At the same time, efforts to diversify into other areas have not been, to put it charitably, as successful as they would have liked.

No, they making money by the bucket-load. Check it out, the new face of Microsoft. They missed mobile, but they've managed to diversify sufficiently into other areas that they are now more profitable than any time in the company's history.

Good riddance to Windows, though. May it die a quick death.

They're just bumping their stock price

[rsilvergun]

with layoffs. Believe it or not this is the result of deregulation of stock trading. It used to be companies couldn't buy their own stock (what with it being stock manipulation and all).That got changed during Reagan and when it did it started the trend to compensate executives with stocks; which in turn created all these perverse incentives for short term stock gains so the CEOs could boost their salaries. This is one effect of that. The constant mergers & acquisitions are another. It's one of those things like repealing Glass-Steagall that pretty much warped our entire economy.

The lesson? If you find that the behavior the regulation was meant to stop has stopped; well, maybe, just maybe the reason is there was a regulation to stop it.