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Microsoft Is Laying off 'Thousands' of Staff in a Major Global Sales Reorganization (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is poised to layoff thousands of employees worldwide in a move to reorganize its salesforce. A source with knowledge of the planned downsizing told TechCrunch that the U.S. firm would lay off "thousands" of staff across the world. The restructuring is set to include an organizational merger that involves its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its SME-focused divisions. The changes are set to be announced this coming week, we understand. Microsoft declined to comment. Earlier this weekend, the Puget Sound Business Journal, Bloomberg and The Seattle Times all reported 'major' layoffs related to a move to increase the emphasis on cloud services within Microsoft's sales teams worldwide. Bloomberg said the redundancies would be "some of the most significant in the sales force in years."
Windows 10 does not use an internal QA staff. It uses Tata Consultancy Group in Bangalore. It's a QA contracting firm that handles firmware and software QA for much of the Fortune 500.
Microsoft reorganizes some parts of the company every year at this time. July 1st is the start of their fiscal year.
That is such bullshit. Apple's laptops are consistently overpriced "like for like" compared to the closest matching PC laptop hardware available. PC laptops also have the distinct advantage of not being designed to be unrepairable and non-upgradable. In the vast majority of higher-end PC laptops the RAM and PCIe SSD can be upgraded by the end user. In many there is an option to have both a PCIe SSD and a storage hard drive installed. Good luck desoldering your BGA memory chips and SSD from your overpriced Macbook Pro. If you don't buy the obnoxiously expensive spec upgrades at check-out, your computer is obsolete the minute you need more RAM or internal storage and the only solution is to buy a whole new Apple computer.
Oh, and let me know when the 15" MBP with the Core i7 doesn't cost $2399. This Asus UX501VW laptop with a Core i7-6700HQ, 4K IPS touchscreen, 512GB PCIe SSD, 16GB DDR4 RAM, is $1079 and has VASTLY better specs than the $2399 MBP in practically all categories. Also, more expensive comparable PC laptops that are still priced lower than the 15" MBP only get better and make the (still using outdated DDR3 for some reason...) MBP look like a joke.
But please, feel free to find another way to support your baseless assertion that "on a like for like comparison as much as possible, Apple laptops cost about the same or even less than their competition." I just did a like-for-like comparison and a 15" Apple laptop you could buy right now gives you drastically lower specs for more than double the price than a PC laptop you also buy right now.