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Microsoft Businesses The Almighty Buck IT

Microsoft Is Laying off 'Thousands' of Staff in a Major Global Sales Reorganization (techcrunch.com) 118

Posted by msmash from the more-job-cuts dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is poised to layoff thousands of employees worldwide in a move to reorganize its salesforce. A source with knowledge of the planned downsizing told TechCrunch that the U.S. firm would lay off "thousands" of staff across the world. The restructuring is set to include an organizational merger that involves its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its SME-focused divisions. The changes are set to be announced this coming week, we understand. Microsoft declined to comment. Earlier this weekend, the Puget Sound Business Journal, Bloomberg and The Seattle Times all reported 'major' layoffs related to a move to increase the emphasis on cloud services within Microsoft's sales teams worldwide. Bloomberg said the redundancies would be "some of the most significant in the sales force in years."
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Microsoft Is Laying off 'Thousands' of Staff in a Major Global Sales Reorganization More

Microsoft Is Laying off 'Thousands' of Staff in a Major Global Sales Reorganization

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  • QA (Score:5, Funny)

    by thegreatbob ( 693104 ) on Monday July 03, 2017 @12:28PM (#54736075) Journal
    Guessing they're sacking the rest of their QA staff, since Windows 10 is clearly coming along so nicely. /snark

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Windows 10 does not use an internal QA staff. It uses Tata Consultancy Group in Bangalore. It's a QA contracting firm that handles firmware and software QA for much of the Fortune 500.

      • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

        by knope ( 4837449 )
        lmfao

      • Re:QA (Score:5, Funny)

        by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Monday July 03, 2017 @01:29PM (#54736527)
        After all the testing got done with Windows 10, the QA testers got laid off and rehired as customer support representatives in the Bangalore call center.
      • This is unfortunate but informative (would mod+ if i wasn't the OP snark-ass); keeping it in-house might have done them some good by tightening feedback loops. I also wonder how much gets lost in communication with people whose native language is not English (I imagine it's nowhere near as bad as the snarksters would make it out to be, but it can't be 0%).

    • Re:QA (Score:4, Funny)

      by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Monday July 03, 2017 @12:59PM (#54736293) Homepage Journal

      Guessing they're sacking the rest of their QA staff

      Come on. Surely they won't get rid of both of them.

    • the investors like their toys. the staff are a dime a dozen whether they are from india or wherever.

    • Guessing they're sacking the rest of their QA staff, since Windows 10 is clearly coming along so nicely. /snark

      I would say that the Samsung, and other tablet makers that use Android, etc, have eaten into MS sales and MS client use. Today, how may people actually write letters or do long documents?

      I use wps.com with Linux (MS Clone that is just great). I also use LibreOffice, which generally comes with some Linux distributions.
      So, when desktop sales are down, when 80+% of servers are Linux based, a company can't keep staff that only works 4 hours per day.

  • Something ain't right. Yeah, you fire folks from time to time. Maybe even whole teams. But mass layoffs in sales? And at a time when Chromebooks and Tablets are threatening market share?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The company top management forced the crappy Metro UI and insane spyware into Windows. And when sales drop, the blame is of course on salesmen. As a former Windows application software developer I can only wonder how fast the MS has managed to alienate its most loyal customers and developers. Only a five years ago the Windows was the easiest and most profitable platform to develop for, but not anymore.

      • Re:Who lays off their Sales people? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday July 03, 2017 @12:57PM (#54736283)

        Indeed. I know of at least one large company (~50k employees) that will go all web-terminal before Win7 goes out of support. They looked at Win10 and decided that there was no way they would move to a platform with an ever-changing UI. Of course, all their internal stuff is already all web-apps, they just need to replace MS office with something web-based. But this is a good thing as the MS monopoly has done a huge disservice to the world.

        • they just need to replace MS office with something web-based

          They could use something like rollApp [rollapp.com], but there's the pesky problem of Outlook, which still lacks an open-source equivalent that duplicates most of its functionality. I would say Outlook is the very last strangle-hold Microsoft has on the corporate market. Every other one of its platforms (the rest of Office, SCCM, Server/Active Directory) contains more than adequate FOSS replacements.

          • ... but there's the pesky problem of Outlook, which still lacks an open-source equivalent that duplicates most of its functionality. I would say Outlook is the very last strangle-hold Microsoft has on the corporate market.

            What functionality is that, specifically? And I mean that as a serious question.

            I don't see anything which Outlook does but other calendar and mail solutions do not - and I work with a lot of Outlook users. When we've talked about moving them off Outlook, there has been significant pushback... but it seems to be all about fear of change. They can't articulate anything Outlook does which other software does not also do.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by jon3k ( 691256 )
              How do you manage Global Address List and Distribution Lists using something other than Exchange? Serious question because that's the one I always get stuck on when I dream of ditching Exchange.
            • Primarily Outlook's large ecosystem of add-ins. Lots of line-of-business apps use such add-ins (Adobe Acrobat, Swiftpage Act!, &c.).
        • Their web-based stuff available for office365 and what-not is (in my opinion) not particularly terrible. I somehow doubt they could sanely cram the full feature set into a browser without making a mess.

    • Something ain't right..... mass layoffs in sales?

      Yes, it's awful. "Microsoft", "salesforce" and "layoffs" in the same sentence! I never thought I'd see the day, you should see my tears. I'm starting a collection to support those poor guys until they can land a job in some Indian "Windows" support call centre..

    • Something ain't right.

      True. Microsoft is teh shrink. Rats jumping off. Couldn't happen to a more deserving gang of thugs.

    • Microsoft is all about the platform, always has been. The platform isn't just Windows now, is all.

  • ... as soon as they do not think they need you anymore. I find it really hard to feel any kind of compassion for those that will get hit.

  • Typical new fiscal year reorg (Score:4, Informative)

    by StreamingEagle ( 1571901 ) on Monday July 03, 2017 @12:59PM (#54736291)
    Microsoft reorganizes some parts of the company every year at this time. July 1st is the start of their fiscal year.

  • Hey Microsoft, instead of reorganizing your sales force, try stop sucking.

    • Responding indirectly to the AC that also posted... I'm on his side regarding .Net and Azure being quite alright.... but I'm stuck in a mindset where I cannot see them as anything but a desktop operating system company, and in this regard they definitely, unequivocally suck.

  • My hobo index is a leading, and trailing, economic indicator. I live in a small city near the railyard. The number of transients hopping off of the train seems to be at a seasonally adjusted high. As most of these people are the last to be hired and the first to be laid off the indicator is showing a slowing economy. Couple it with the demise of HP, CA, and other legacy companies and I smell a trend.

  • With MS removing staff, it will be time for teh Linux desktop!

    (insert evil laugh here)

    Seriously, this is kind of normal. My MS sales reps and my TAM are all mono-focused on the Cloud and what Azure and Azure Government can do for us to leverage computing (as well as ensure future subscriptions).

    They don't even mention phones or mobile devices anymore. The focus is now "how can we move your 200TB of on prem storage into Azure and get your on a subscription model."

    PS: Slashdot mods, sorry about the OT introdu
  • Maybe they've finally realised that they can get more money from corps by simplifying their license types and standardising on software subscriptions. Windows, Office, CRM, Azure, CIS. What they need next is a cost effective way to hand back perpetual licences for some temporary discounts on their enterprise subscription products.

  • Start the layoffs with the unpaid beta testers/users !

  • to get more $ per person then they already have. It's a good thing. It means Microsoft is a bit more close to fucking off.

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