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Microsoft Plans Up To 3,000 Job Cuts In a Sales Staff Overhaul To Fuel Cloud Growth (cnbc.com)
Microsoft announced a major reorganization on Wednesday that will include thousands of layoffs, largely in sales. From a report: The job cuts amount to less that 10 percent of the company's total sales force, and about 75 percent of them will be outside the U.S., the company said. Reports from last week suggested this was going to happen, and that Microsoft was going to specifically focus on how it sells its cloud services product, Azure. Microsoft's cloud business has been booming over recent quarters -- Microsoft noted Azure sales growth of 93 percent last quarter. While Amazon has become a bigger competitor in the space, Microsoft's restructuring is to pivot to software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure.
This is a continuation of the sales staff cuts that the hatchet man that was Bill Gates CFO put in place.
They do this all the time.
It's based on an outmoded concept of how things should work, not how they actually work.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't forget "Windows as a service." "Pay me now, and pay me later, and again, and again". Abuse of market dominance?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is all in sales, not technology. Being in a systems engineering/design role, I often get pulled in on meetings where the software and hardware sales guys are courting the CIOs and other executives. It's amazing how much money someone can make selling stuff like enterprise agreements, and equally amazing how much money they have to spend to get the CIOs to sign the paper. Expensive dinners, rounds of golf, sports tickets, you name it -- I've never tagged along on the strip club visits some CIOs I've worked with have demanded from their salespeople.
I'm guessing Microsoft is getting rid of all the salespeople who are narrowly focused on closing these big licensing deals and trying to refocus everyone on selling Azure and subscriptions. That's the grand master plan -- get out of the boxed software business and force everyone to rent computing power and software tools from them, IBM mainframe style. It's an absolute license to print money -- all they need to do is provide power, cooling, network and hardware. We're doing a huge Azure-based project now and it's really interesting -- but it's eye-wateringly expensive when you think about the long term. The long term lock-in is what they're going for -- rather than buying a Windows Server license for $20K once, you pay over and over and over, just like companies do for Office 365.
I just wish they'd slow down a little bit and let people catch up -- there are new features every week, major changes to existing ones very frequently and now Azure Stack is almost released. I think at some point they're going to have to slow it down just to nail down problems once things get to a certain size. (God help them the day someone figures out how to compromise Azure AD in an undetectable way.)
The only 'cloud' I associate with Microsoft is the miasma they continually produce.
If those 3,000 weren't doing a whole lot, then it might be -- and this is coming from someone who really wants more stable employment relationships in the world.
I've worked in big companies almost my whole career, both as an employee and a contractor. I've seen plenty of people who don't do tons of work and still manage to keep their jobs. The truth is that the bigger a company is, the easier it is for people to "hide out" and find a nice safe corner where they don't have to do a whole lot:
- It's gotten way faster in the last 10 years or so, but it used to be that if you were an acquisition hire, it would take a very long time to lay off the person they didn't need.
- Large organizations develop their own internal politics, and being a favorite of a well-connected executive or even middle manager is one way to get away without doing the best possible job.
- A corollary to this is the fact that those who really know how to work the system have studied every single rule, custom and exception to the rule. They know exactly how every single internal organization decision is made, obsess over things like pay grades and vacation entitlements, and will always come out on the right side of any reorg simply because their second full-time job is internal tea leaf reading.
- Large organizations also thrive on empire builders, and managers try to increase the number of employees they're managing by any means necessary. Latch on to someone who likes you, and you could get rewarded with the equivalent of a no-show job -- I've seen it happen.
- It's also possible for really big companies to "lose" entire groups of people, as in, we know they're on the payroll but have no idea what that department does these days.
- Fewer places allow this these days, but I've worked in jobs where there are levels upon levels of management for even the simplest tasks. What usually happens is the person doing a job gets promoted, then promotes the next in line so they don't have to directly manage the work, then on up the line. If a company has enough margin (like a consulting company for example,) this is how you wind up with a hierarchy of 8 account executives servicing the same customer.
Microsoft is kind of like an IBM or AT&T pre-breakup in that regard. I'm sure there are plenty of people just hanging on because there's just not a lot of pressure cost-wise. One-off software revenue was huge for them, and now they're poised to vacuum in billions a month in rental fees.
How about getting some more in-house QA going for the Windows 10? It's got more bugs than a (sarcastic comparison to things with many bugs).
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...