Microsoft Laying Off 18,000 Employees

At least they're able to admit when something isn't working. I'm actually impressed with how fast they're acting for such a massive company.

@mrburger:

@mrburger said:

That letter really synergizes the focus of their corporate journey's viability transition for me.

Yeah, but unfortunately, it doesn't adequately leverage broad observational cognitive assets to normalize the framework of optimal cultural imperatives and other concerns likely held by our valued associates in regards to establishing a verticality oriented contextualization of utilizing a more progressive temporal model. Dude talks funny too.

@ch3burashka said:

Google does a lot of the same thing. But to be completely honest, I think they've taken the kinect thing way too far. They didn't pull that plug prematurely. And the phone thing? They've been trying to make cool smart phones since BEFORE the iphone came out.

@brodehouse: I think you are living under multiple illusions and you probably swallow a lot of rhetoric from a far right political faction without looking at facts...

Firstly, MS could have cut just a few of the executives making bad decisions that account for laying off 18,000 people who have little to do with company strategy. But they didn't. I'm sure they have about 50-60 middle to upper middle mgmt that have salary+bonus equal to or greater than these 18k.

The problem is, once you reach a certain level, there is no accountability for anything. If you screw up and run a company into the ground (which is hardly MS situation) you can blame it on "redundancy" and "synthesize" 18,000 human beings.

Your arguement assumes American Capitalism is a meritocracy, where people are paid what they're worth, and hard work is rewarded. In reality, the 1% is more often than not born into wealth, given positions that are not earned because of family name, or network...and kept in place due to being in that club rather than earning anything for themselves. Look at Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, George W Bush, and the list goes on.

@noodleunit: Do they already know it ain't working? How about they never actually wanted it to work out?
To me it looks like this has been planed for quite a while, Stephen Elop had been Microsofts trojan horse to get into Nokia, so to speak.

He grabbed a big fat signing bonus of $6 million, in addition to his $1,4 million annual salary, quality people demand quality payment, right? Then he proceeded to do his "quality job", which ended up looking like this:

During Elop's tenure, Nokia annual revenues fell 40% from 41.7 Billion Euros per year to 25.3 Billion Euros per year. Nokia profits fell 92% from 2.4 Billion Euros per year to 188 Million Euros per year. Nokia handset sales fell 40% from 456 million units per year to 274 million units per year. Nokia share price which was at 7.12 Euros on the day Elop was hired, had fallen to 81% to a bottom level of 1.44 Euros two years later, after which it began trading at 4.14 Euros, up 36% on the day. Elop's success in negotiating the sale of Nokia's struggling mobile device business to Microsoft has been described by many securities analysts as a significant victory for NOK shareholders, particularly when viewed in context of failed efforts by Blackberry or HP to secure value for handset business owned by those companies.

I don't understand how any of this can be considered a "significant victory for NOK shareholders", to me it looks more like an "significant victory for Microsoft vultures". And tbh i'm getting sick and tired of "managers" receiving millions upon millions in bonuses and salary, yet never being held accountable for their failings.

Instead they are firing the grunts, the people that actually do all the heavy lifting, the people that actually have to depend on the job for survival, because these people don't have millions upon millions stacked away from their previous "ventures". These people are actually dependent on that job, while most "Multimillion $ MBA's" only show up to throw a couple of more millions on top of their already obscene amount of wealth.

Well all I can say to this is that I am in a mall in Switzerland right now and the biggest electronics reseller has taken the xbox one off shelves. Its all Ps4 an Wii.

@wuddel: I don't think this news (the layoffs) pertains to the xbox division.

No wonder Xbox 360 is already dead , while the ps3 is as alive as ever ! , i made the wrong choice getting that piece of garbage =/

Yeah I'm one of those atheist, pro-gay, pro-abortion, sex-positive, egalitarian, liberal folks who swallow tons of rhetoric from the far right. Because business finance comes down to your politics and not, you know, the economic realities of business finance. The fact that you begin your appraisal of this situation by assuming business finances are all a matter of political persuasion tells me that this is culture war issue for you and has nothing to do with business.

Firstly, MS could have cut just a few of the executives making bad decisions that account for laying off 18,000 people who have little to do with company strategy. But they didn't.

You have no idea who is getting cut or what their actual jobs are. I bet you most of the executives associated with the divisions of the company that are being eliminated or shrunk will also be let go, because there's no need for upper management when there's nothing to manage. Those decisions are not political, they're mechanical. Once again, too many young people believe this 'job provider' nonsense and don't realize that when companies offer jobs, it's to fill a need. It's not because they're doing the world a favor by sharing their money with a new person.

I do like that your plan is to fire executives and continue running the branches of the division that are not profitable. Man, can't wait until you get some money of your own to burn.

Since the other person isn't responding, maybe you can; if the 18,000 employees who are being let go bring a net profit to the company greater than what their salaries, benefits and insurance costs.... why would they let them go? If the people being let go are the hard-working people you say they are, and the executives who were not let go are the incompetent stooges you say they are (because this is just a storyline for you), then how will Microsoft stay profitable?

Your arguement assumes American Capitalism is a meritocracy, where people are paid what they're worth, and hard work is rewarded. In reality, the 1% is more often than not born into wealth, given positions that are not earned because of family name, or network...and kept in place due to being in that club rather than earning anything for themselves. Look at Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, George W Bush, and the list goes on.

Excellent sermon, but did you want to talk about Microsoft? You know, the company founded by a middle class dropout?

Man, it must be really nice for most people to work hard, gain skills and acquire better positions throughout their life just for kind fellows such as you to blanket absolutely every one of them as being a part of the 1%, that class of people who are inherently wicked and deserving of scorn due to the circumstances of their birth. I'm an accountant, where do I fit in? Do you have to be in a management position to be ethically reprehensible for existing?

See, what you describe as living under illusions I would describe as not being totally full of shit.

and then Sony is making Powers, the show we've all wanted for so long. The best comic book about super heroes ever. Brian motherfucking Bendis.

Ken Levine's favorite fucking comic. Hell yeah!

Microsoft shuts down their "original tv content" whatever.....when they were all about that stupid stuff at the beginning.....and Sony is making something that is just as huge and important as The Last Guardian continuing to exist.

Damn Sony is awesome. Now Powers better not stay in development limbo forever now...that show's gonna knock everyone on their ass if it's done right.

Everyone read the Powers comic book if you don't know what I'm talking about or listen to the Irrational Podcast episode where Ken Levine interviews Brian Michael Bendis.

You'll be inspired to check it out, after you hear how much of a little kid Ken Levine still is about this stuff.

There's my primary issue with Microsoft. For all the yang they're talking about reforming and reshuffling the company, listening to the people at the top (the people least likely to be getting reformed or reshuffled), one thing seems agonizingly obvious to me:

Microsoft still don't know what consumers want. The reason Windows 8 became a reality was because businessmen talked with other businessmen, got themselves all riled up about inter-brand synergies and "digital work/life experiences", and had their head so far up Microsoft's spacious corporate ass that they couldn't see the forest for the trees.

Hell, they didn't even know they were looking at trees.

They didn't even bring woodworking equipment.

The only thing they brought was a big sticker that said "mobile-first, cloud-first, also touch", slapped that fucker on a stump, shouted in unison "STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT" before giving themselves well-deserved slaps to the crotch, taking off all their clothes and running buck-wild into the marketplace with a new "clarity of vision".

Microsoft certainly needed to fire 18000 people (as crappy as it sounds). But what they needed more was to hire fresh management that hadn't been incubated inside of Microsoft. They need to hire outsiders, creatives, critics and destroyers.

Words like that from Nadella (and even worse Stephen Elop, former head of Nokia and current head of Devices) inspire nothing but doubt in me for the future of the company.

Business speak will be the death of Microsoft. Too busy counting the fingers on their hands to notice the axe above their shoulder.

Just as nobody forces people to leave pithy comments about others' misfortune.

"Premature" depends on our own personal experiences; you seem fed up with the Kinect that you probably would've preferred it never come out. As for the phones, sure, whatever, maybe. I'm not a phone guy; I wouldn't know their history with that.

What I'm referring to is the A-to-B narrative. Regardless of prior phone deployments, the Kin thing was surprising because of how much build-up occurred. If they'd slipped them out quietly, then cancelled them, no one would have batted an eye. From what I remember, they were positioning it as the successor to the Sidekick, at least spiritually. For something that ate up so many resources and, more importantly from the consumer perspective, marketing, it's incredibly weird to see them dump it. For anyone who decided to buy a Kin would've been even more shocked to see the support pulled from under them 3 months down the line.

The Kinect is a controversial piece of tech. People hate it, people...are ambivalent towards it. The point is, Microsoft must've been working on Kinect integration into the XBONE since the first iteration came out in 2010(?). The saw that as the future. When they cancelled the Always On features, that was also controversial - people hated on it but once they did, a lot of fans came out of the woodwork. However, that was a software rework. Probably a huge clusterfuck, but all easily done within the box and on their cloud servers. The Kinect thing is bewildering because not only do they kill their vision of the Minority Report future they were probably imagining, but also undermines any future games that would use it. I'm sure Harmonix was pissed to hear this happen. Their market cap is instantly limited by current hardware sales plus the trickle of people buying separate Kinects.

I understand there's a time and place in business to cut the umbilical, to cut your losses and trash an initiative because it's a misguided idea. But you do that before you ship it. When EA cancelled Elite (twice) on the eve of the releases, that was hilarious and probably disastrous for EA. Microsoft has blown that record out of the water by months.

I completely agree.

I also like that your comment is like a matryoshka doll of analogies.