Yet another “Expect the unexpected” kind of story knocking your door! Yes, it’s about the computer giant MICRSOFT. Without a shadow of doubt, there would be very few techies who would not have taken services from Microsoft or used its products.
Microsoft lay offs 2100 employees
Most often, Microsoft would be on news announcing its new releases. But this time, it’s not! As Microsoft announced earlier, about downsizing of about 18,000 of its employees, in its round two of planned dismissal the company fired 2,100 of them worldwide on Thursday. About 747 of them were from the Seattle-Redmond area, in the state of Washington, where the company is headquartered while the remaining layoffs were from locations worldwide.
The layoffs were not from any specific team but across a variety of them. There is ideally no concrete information on which teams were hardly hit by the lay off. The firing began as early as last July, when 13,000 of its employees, predominantly from Nokia, were handed their pink-slips.
The lay-off included resources from the Operating systems department and every other department. Sources mention that, the acquiring of Nokia’s employees and entering the phone business was a challenge to Microsoft’s earnings and hence the layoff.
Also read : Samsung Launches Sixth Branded Customer Service Plaza
The Microsoft officials had already given a heads-up saying that they would be revising their worldwide workforce by cutting 18,000 jobs with 12,500 of those cuts coming from the employees, as reported by CNet. Not stopping with this, Microsoft is not leaving its contingent employees untouched. It’s planning to minimize its dependency on them by 20 percent, as a part of the re-alignment plan.
This action of Microsoft will attract the company about 1.1 billion dollars to 1.6 billion dollars as pre-tax charges, for severance and related benefit costs over the next four quarters. But this is not the end of the story, with two rounds of layoff, the giant company is still planning to chop of another 2,900 of them by July 2015.
The only justification from the CEO, Satya Nadella for the layoff is that it’s a part of their turnaround strategy which will shift the company from being a mere “devices and services” company to a more productive one which would help its customers. He had also remarked that eliminating roles in certain areas would imply that they are adding more important ones in key strategic areas.
Well, for a Herculean concern like the Microsoft, despite the downsizing being historical, it would get back to its seat with ease. But let’s hope the process is transparent and thoughtful enough, with deepest regards and concern for the affected individuals. All that we can do right now is to wait and watch the big picture till July 2015!
Pavithra Ranganathan
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