12/22/2008, 11:50am, EST
Monday, December 22ndMS readying "substantial" job cuts?
A leak from a reported Microsoft insider and published Sunday may point to rare but substantial layoffs at the Windows developer. The company's alleged job cuts are described as "substantial" and are said to involve many feedback meetings that are actually attempts to screen out underperforming employees or those with relatively little usefulness. As much as 10 percent of Microsoft's finance department may be cut outright.
Other teams are also being reorganized or having their operating budgets cut, according to reports.
If accurate, the cuts will come on January 15th, or exactly one week before Microsoft is poised to announce its results for the fall quarter that ends this month. Such reductions are believed to hint at significant financial difficulty at Microsoft, which had near-flat growth even in the summer, when the economic downturn had yet to fully materialize.
Much of Microsoft's more recent difficulty has been attributed to its struggle to sell Windows Vista, which has been dropped in favor of its less expensive and less performance-intensive XP counterpart for developing countries, netbooks and many business PCs.
Microsoft hasn't commented on the validity of the claimed job reductions.
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: Vista, software.Microsoft
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Hmmm
I have a number of friends working as knowledge engineers for M$. Hope they survive the cuts.
On the other hand, Windows certainly couldn't suck any more than it already does.
Should cut 100%
And close up shop. When you make garbage eventually you will fail.
When you're on top, the only way is down.
GE?
Looks like they're following Jack Welch's strategy at GE?
usefulness
“or those with relatively little usefulness“
Isn’t that about 90% of the company?
CVB
Beginning of the end?
I certainly hope so...
Goodbye Vista Team.
The country will be so much more productive without you.
Vista was impressive...
... just not in a good way.
vista
The country will be so much more productive without you.
What, exactly, about vista have you noticed to cut into your productivity?
Oh, wait, you've probably never used Vista, and thus have no clue whether it would be more or less productive than any other version of windows.
Ballmer's leaving?
"...underperforming employees or those with relatively little usefulness..."
Bye-Bye Ballmer. Time to do the monkey-boy dance and say those four little words... " I HATE THIS COMPANY"! developers, developers, developers... give it up for me...
Gonna miss you!
Re: vista
I'll be the first to admit that I never used Vista.
My neighbor, she got an HP top of the line laptop with 4GB RAM for X-Mas last year and talk about slow! Even with all that bloat, both app software add-on and Vista OS, 4 GB of RAM was not enough. I wanted to experiment with Vista having heard so much negativity about it. However, she said she was going to take it back home to Montana so her brother can "clean it up" to make it faster and run properly. She gets a brand new top of the line laptop for a Christmas present last year and set it aside on the desk to become a gigantic paper weight until her brother could clean it up and get it working properly. That's good enough reason for me to avoid Vista and PC's. Not because it can be run by your everyday average "Mojave" tv commercial computer illiterate but because it can't!