Microsoft in trouble: the company picnic, layoffs, now product cutbacks
Microsoft is going through what can only be described as a rough patch. It recently announced the first year-on-year revenue decline ever, canceled the company picnic, and made 5,000 people redundant. Now, those layoffs are starting to affect a number of different products.
Microsoft is a huge company, one of the world’s largest, so maybe a few thousands job cuts here and there aren’t as huge news as they should be. But each one of those culled employees has a family which needs supporting, and 5,000 people have been laid off by the company with more to follow soon.
The first 5,000 job cuts, the largest ever cull undertaken by Microsoft, were announced last year. Many have already taken place, but the latest 3,000 employees to be got rid of have just found out their fate. Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer’s memo to staff leaked on Tuesday and would seem to imply more job cuts could follow.
Those layoffs are now seeping through to products, with several being scaled back supposedly due to the loss of workforce. While no product is actually being killed off entirely, the .Net Micro Framework, MSN Direct Service, and the ResponsePoint phone system are all taking significant hits.
According to Channel Register, ResponsePoint and MSN Direct are now under review, while the business model for the .NET Micro Framework will be changed significantly. .NET will be turned into a community-supported product, with Microsoft waiving rights to royalties so that the source code can be distributed openly. The community will then provide support for current users of the technology.
Deep cuts have also been made to Massive, the in-game advertising unit that Microsoft only recently acquired. Expenses for company employees and and executives will also take a hammering, with Microsoft obviously very keen to tighten its belt in light of the still-worsening economy.
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May 8th, 2009
“.NET will be turned into a community-supported product, with Microsoft waiving rights to royalties so that the source code can be distributed openly. The community will then provide support for current users of the technology.”
And this from the company that described open source software as being “a cancer”, “communist” and “un-American”. Did they change their minds, have they run out of ideas, or are they simply panicking?
May 8th, 2009
Death by a thousand cuts.