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Microsoft Laying Off 18,000 Employees - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 18 July 2014 / 6,274 Views

Microsoft announced yesterday they will be playing off 18,000 emploees. The news came from a memo to employees called "Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture." New CEO Satya Nadella laid out the plans for the companies future.

The majority of the layoffs, 12,500 jobs, will come from the Nokia Devices and Services business. Microsoft acquired this business from Nokia in 2013 for $7.2 billion. The layoffs will happen in the next year, with the majority in the next sice months.

"It's important to note that while we are eliminating roles in some areas, we are adding roles in certain other strategic areas," said Nadella. "My promise to you is that we will go through this process in the most thoughtful and transparent way possible."

The majority of the other 5,500 job cuts appear to come from the management level. Nadella plans to have fewer layers of managers, which will help speed up the flow of information, as well as decision making.

For Xbox fans, it appears the Xbox division has not been affected in a major way by the layoffs.

"With a set of changes already implemented earlier this year in these teams, this means there will be limited change for the Surface, Xbox hardware, PPI/meetings or next generation teams," said Microsoft Devices Group head Stephen Elop.


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8 Comments
Podings (on 19 July 2014)

Buying up a Finnish phone company for the technology and firing everyone afterwards.

Nadella's got the "transparency" bit right, although he probably wasn't involved with that takeover in the first place.

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teamsilent13 (on 18 July 2014)

That is horrible. I hope everyone laid off finds work quickly.

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Always funny when I hear such comments - people pretending to care so much. And the next thing they do is SHIT on devs or anyone else in the industry for being so "disgusting" by doing DLC, patches or delaying a game.

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NeoMahi (on 20 July 2014)

This is pretty bad news. Hopefully those out of work will find it quickly. Microsoft is a multi-billion dollar company. I think they can easily afford the salaries of 18,000 people or reassign them jobs in different divisions of Microsoft. They're going to hire on a ton more anyway. All of this laying off is to try and make them look like they're cutting the fat of the screw up the Don Mattrick made to save face for their poor sales of Xbox One. YES! This is all related to Xbox One's sales and success. If Microsoft can make it seem like they're cutting out everyone that screwed things up, then people will believe and regain trust with them. The problem is, that damage has already been done. People hate Microsoft anyway and this isn't going to change that. Microsoft thinks they're above and beyond the world. That they're infallible. That they can rip off others idea's, claim innovation, and get away with it. They're like the little rich kid that can buy everyone off rather than work for what they get. They can buy off relationships instead of working with others. That's what this is all about. That's what happens when you bring someone in from EA to run your business. They drive it into the ground. This is all about trying to save face but again, the damage is already been done. Better luck on Xbox Zwei.

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technicalgamer NeoMahi (on 21 July 2014)

I really doubt that there will be another Xbox in the future,I'm afraid...

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Michael-5 (on 18 July 2014)

Do you really need 3 similar articles published within minutes of each other? This could have been merged with the other articles.

Sucks for Nokia staff, they made some reliable phones in the past.

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HylianSwordsman (on 18 July 2014)

Sounds like it won't affect Microsoft all that much, actually, and won't affect Xbox beyond some of it's non gaming components, which no one cares about. Still, that's a pretty staggering statistic there.

Wrap your head around this: Microsoft is planning on laying off enough employees to restaff Nintendo 3.5 times.

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Assyrian612 (on 18 July 2014)

He's not a legitimate leader!

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