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Microsoft to lay off 'thousands' of employees
- Thread starter LordOfLore
- Start date
Lasthope106
Member
This is what they do when their stock price is at the highest it has been. I hate wall street and its greed.
killer rin
Member
#ForTheShareholders
JeTmAn81
Member
Layoffs are part of running a healthy business. Companies don't exist as charities which supply jobs, they exist to maximize stakeholder value. The Nokia stuff is just poor management.
The Jackdog
Member
sales and marketing huh? i wonder why. just cost cutting?
Abstruse Moose
Member
Too much is never enough. Infinite growth and all that.
What is dead may never die, and all that...
BotoxAgent
Member
Maybe if they had more tax breaks those jobs could have been saved
yanipheonu
Member
D-do they still make those? I genuinely have no idea.
Doesn't make it any better for the employees and that's the sore point. It's not like the business doesn't make a healthy profit as is, but it must always increase at the cost of the non managerial labor force typically.
Mysterious
Banned
All Satya has been doing is cutting jobs.
Sectorseven
Member
I guess Xbox division is safe?
thelatestmodel
Junior, please.
Barely. It's called Windows 10 Mobile now, and there's only a few devices that carry it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Windows_10_Mobile_devices
Steelyuhas
Member
Of course
shnurgleton
Member
Sales and marketing less relevant than ever in the internet age
They are still bringing in billions in profit each year and will profit in the billions this year. Keeping those 3,000 employees would do the company no harm. It is all about pleasing wall street and maintaining a specific amount in "growth".
JeTmAn81
Member
A company like Microsoft can give generous severance packages, and their former employees have an important company on their resume. People who get laid off from Walmart have much bigger problems.
AlteredForms
Banned
This man understands the situation.
Freshmaker
I am Korean.
Damaging productivity increases shareholder value?
Even if Microsoft is making billions a year do people really expect them to keep jobs that are being replaced by automation? There is only so much you can do to shuffle employees around when departments become irrelevant. I would even make th argument that keeping employees on payroll and having them do jack negatively impacts the employee and the company. I would rather get a severance and advanced notice that I was a part of reduction that way I can find a new job. These are likely highly skilled people.
JeTmAn81
Member
Layoffs are for employees who aren't productive in the company as a whole.
Pagusas
Elden Member
Marketing is more relevant than ever thanks to the internet age.
Pankratous
Member
Yeah, no it isn't. I don't know how it's done elsewhere, but working in a big company in the UK, when it comes to mass redundancies, they pretty much pick at random.
Phrozenflame500
Member
why would any company be obligated to pay people they don't need
shnurgleton
Member
Marketing, yes; traditional sales orgs, no way
JeTmAn81
Member
[citation needed]
That's really not how business works. How would it make sense to cut employees for no reason? You do it to cut costs, either because your revenue isn't high enough or because the cost to pay those employees doesn't provide enough ROI.
tearsintherain
Member
Mass layoffs are a tool a lot of companies use to get rid of people that would be much harder to fire without them filing lawsuits. Its much harder to file a age, sex, race, etc discrimination lawsuit against a company if you were laid off as part of a mass firing. I imagine a lot of older workers will get hit with this layoff, which has its pluses and minuses - usually better severance packages, but its going to be a lot harder finding a new job after a certain age.
dragonelite
Member
Or automate so much that only 20% of the division can do the same amount or even more work.
Nope. Shift to Service structure via Cloud (Azure). Most big tech companies that shift to Cloud will do so too I expect.
Sucks for staff but it's the nature of SaaS model. You don't need same level of marketing/sales for something that's sold like electricity or water as a commodity you sign up to as a service.
Good thing for Xbox Live (which is some ways as a subscription service was a proto Cloud offering) because if it was all about just selling some hardware I wouldn't want to be Xbox division as the shift to what I think of as EaaS (Everything as a Servive) contnues at MS.
Surface, etc will be fine as they want their own device for their OS a'la Apple. I think.
Earthstrike
Member
Couple things here:
1. Publically traded companies are, by-law, required to maximise profit. If they don't they can be legally sued, and the top executives are in line to get canned if this ever happens successfully.
2. Layoffs can either target individual poor performing employees, or a division of the company whose overall function within the whole administrative structure of the company isn't needed, or costs more than it's worth. In this case it's the latter. This isn't as much about employee quality as it is about Nokia and likely windows phone.
Capitalism as a societal philosophy needs to be structured to be greedy. The counter to that is supposed to be governance that keeps it in line. The last part is what is fucked in america.
1. Publically traded companies are, by-law, required to maximise profit. If they don't they can be legally sued, and the top executives are in line to get canned if this ever happens successfully.
2. Layoffs can either target individual poor performing employees, or a division of the company whose overall function within the whole administrative structure of the company isn't needed, or costs more than it's worth. In this case it's the latter. This isn't as much about employee quality as it is about Nokia and likely windows phone.
Capitalism as a societal philosophy needs to be structured to be greedy. The counter to that is supposed to be governance that keeps it in line. The last part is what is fucked in america.
Greigor The Fellhand
Member
my guess is any remnants from the Phone /mobile division that haven't been repurposed are getting the boot
ClosingADoor
Member
Moving away from the separate product model into subscriptions. You don't need to convince people to buy your new products with every new version, when you got them into a subscription model already.
JeTmAn81
Member
Just wait until we get robot voices calling us up asking if we want to switch to MCI
dragonelite
Member
It also doesn't help that with cloud(Azure) Microsoft is not really pushing windows server.
Randolph Freelander
Member
It always sucks for the people affected, but this is what a business should do. At least, a publicly traded business. Private companies can sacrifice profit for the sake of people at their own leisure.
cpp_is_king
Member
What does that have to do with anything?
Yeah, that's the problem.
JeTmAn81
Member
Hey man, I said stakeholder, not shareholder. My personal philosophy is that businesses should be good stewards of their employees, their community and their environment. But they don't exist to provide jobs for people whose work isn't needed.
cpp_is_king
Member
From divisions which have lower future strategic importance than they did in the past.
If Division X is super important to the company's long term strategy, and then over time it no longer becomes as important due to changes in the market, then you've got a ton of people who are not providing as much value to the company as they used to be. "Fair" is not even part of the equation, they just aren't needed anymore because the company doesn't need anyone to do what they are doing.
A case could certianly be made for transferring them within the company, but "they should just keep them, they already turn a profit" is a terrible business strategy. Why should a company provide a job to someone who they literally have no use for? Will the person just sit in an office and stare at the wall like they do in Japanese Boredom Rooms?
BlazinSkatinAxel
Member
Their sales and marketing teams need to go. They suck. This is why Google and Apple are massacring Microsoft.