Massive Job Cuts Are Reportedly Coming For Microsoft Employees 300
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that Microsoft is reportedly planning a major staff reduction that would top Steve Ballmer's record 5,800-head layoff in 2009. From the article: The reductions — which may be unveiled as soon as this week — will probably be in areas such as Nokia and divisions of Microsoft that overlap with that business, as well as marketing and engineering, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.
You don't need so many workers (Score:2, Informative)
...when you are using linux.
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
Pity that corporations like this always seem to want to lay everyone off at once, though. Why can't they do it gradually?
Sometimes they do, through a process of natural wastage. Trouble is that it means that you put a block on hires, meaning that skills gaps can't be filled. And often your best people leave, whilst the dead wood clings on.
Re:Who couldn't see this coming? (Score:1, Informative)
MS made profit hand over foot last year when they did a price hike on Windows Server products. They have the enterprise market completely owned, as there are just no other games in town that can scale. Need E-mail, Exchange is it. Well, unless you want to trust a cloud provider, which can break PCI-DSS3 or Sarbanes-Oxley regs if private... or FISMA if US government. So, it is Exchange or nada. Which brings in AD as a must.
So, MS can lose out in other sectors. It has such a large captive audience that it can have a price hike in the enterprise, then blow it on -all- other fronts... and still be profitable.
Remember, MS going into the phone market is not about profit. It is about -growth-. Stockholders don't care if you are making money. It is all about growth, even if it means hemorrhaging money every quarter. So, what pays for the forays into other markets are MS's business customers.
MS is doing quite well. There is just nothing out there that can scale anywhere near as well as Exchange or Sharepoint. Period.
For smaller businesses, there are more solutions available (Zimbra comes to mind, as well as RedHat's options.) However, once you have such a large amount of installed machines that you have to rely on GPOs, the game changes.
Of course, if I'm wrong, please correct me. I'm posting as AC because I may be completely off base here.
Re:Who couldn't see this coming? (Score:5, Informative)
"Irrelevant. Companies don't keep employees because they are affordable, but because they are profitable. If an employee is not adding net value, it is better for both Microsoft and the overall economy for that person to be employed elsewhere."
Not quite true. Profitable companies reduce work force to compensate the CEO and the company elite, while spinning the upcoming company death spiral as good for the stock price because costs are reduced. Reducing the work force won't improve moral, change the culture, create new products, or improve the long term prospects of the company. Anyone in the workforce who can leave will leave. What it will do is boost the stock price long enough for the current company elite to sell their stock at inflated prices and justify the ginormous bonuses they will get right before the plunge into financial crises - at which time they will pull the golden parachute and land in some other cash rich company.
Re:Who couldn't see this coming? (Score:4, Informative)
Exchange is laughable, only people who care about certifications use it, and they are the laughing stock of people who actually use servers. There is a reason 99% of all servers are Unix based.
And Sharepoint has been a nightmare for everyone who's had to deal with it. I replace Sharepoint solutions with open source ones (often Drupal, as it performs easily 100x better on equivalent hardware, and can talk to an AD quite easily), and every customer is very satisfied.
Re:Who couldn't see this coming? (Score:5, Informative)
I remember in the late 1970's when IBM people were laughing at these 'toy' microcomputers. HA HA! Those toys will never be like real computers. Certainly not a threat to IBM which is making gobs of money. In fact, IBM is more profitable than ever.
IBM introduced a PC in 1981. Thinking they might sell up to two million. By the mid 1990's IBM had lost the PC market, abandoned the PS/2 attempt to re-monopolize it, and eventually got out of the PC business completely. Before the end of the 1990's IBM had re-invented itself. Think the same thing won't happen to Microsoft? You may be too young to remember, but in the 1980's, even by the late 1980's it was completely laughable to even consider that IBM might find itself on hard times. But it happened. And just a few years ago it was laughable to suggest that Microsoft might lose its industry dominance. Not so much laughable anymore.
> Moves like this don't really help anything.. not even the bottom line, since the massive cuts crush morale and limit the ability of the company to innovate to keep ahead of the competition.
Moves far more radical than this may be the only way Microsoft stays around in the long term. We'll see what Microsoft looks like in a decade.
Re:of course (Score:5, Informative)
I don't doubt that if you are a large company the licensing fees are very reasonable but for a small scale company that has to make purchases ad-hoc, MS Licensing is a struggle and costs a lot. I have been at multiple smaller companies with an ops budget so tight, development could not afford to buy more cals of Windows Server let alone the multiple you need because of the (artificial) configuration requirements. This requires the annoying situation where you setup multiple machines but do not activate them that will ultimately lock up when time expires requiring a full wipe and install.
This "small scale side" of the market been Microsoft's weakness for awhile and where Linux shines. Maybe there is a program or small scale license level that allows for these but they don't advertise it well enough for me to know let alone a scrounging CEO acting like a CTO.
Re:Who couldn't see this coming? (Score:4, Informative)
MS's mistake, the one that got them where they're at, is not investing in their product and fighting with governments in expensive lawsuits because of anti-competitive practices.
What?!?? This is just completely backwards. Microsoft has spent vast amounts on R&D, yet has come up with few new ideas that their customers care about. Their customers don't want "innovation", they want stable interfaces. The "anti-competitive practices" are precisely what has made Microsoft successful, and the legal effort to extend those practices in the face of government opposition has been astonishingly successful, at minimal cost.
Re:Who couldn't see this coming? (Score:5, Informative)
Exchange is laughable, only people who care about certifications use it, and they are the laughing stock of people who actually use servers. There is a reason 99% of all servers are Unix based.
And Sharepoint has been a nightmare for everyone who's had to deal with it. I replace Sharepoint solutions with open source ones (often Drupal, as it performs easily 100x better on equivalent hardware, and can talk to an AD quite easily), and every customer is very satisfied.
Many business on the MS platform will go all-in with Exchange, primarily because of the level of integration with all products that MS offers. To call those that use Exchange "laughing stock," is essentially a troll.
Sharepoint offers a lot more than Drupal does to a business that employs actual developers, as well as those that understand how to leverage Sharepoint with Analysis Services and PowerPivot. There is also a lot more extensibility of workflows with less dev time than Drupal. Companies probably shouldn't bother with Sharepoint unless they actually care about those things, because it's essentially an expensive CMS without them.