vowe dot net :: A message from Microsoft Steve

A message from Microsoft Steve

by Volker Weber

In January, in response to the global economic downturn, I announced our plan to adjust the company’s cost structure through spending reductions and job eliminations. Today, we are implementing the second phase of this plan.

This is difficult news to share. Because our success at Microsoft has always been the direct result of the talent, hard work, and commitment of our people, eliminating positions is hard.

Today’s action includes positions in the United States and in a number of countries around the world. In the U.S., affected employees will be notified directly by their managers today. In other countries, local leadership teams will provide more specific information about the impact to their organizations.

With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010. We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it’s important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible, and so that organizations can concentrate their efforts and resources on strategic objectives.

As we move forward, we will continue to closely monitor the impact of the economic downturn on the company and if necessary, take further actions on our cost structure including additional job eliminations.

For those of you directly affected by today’s announcement, I want to thank you for your contribution to Microsoft and assure you that we will continue to provide support as we did during the previous job eliminations.

And for everyone across the company, I want to reemphasize how much I appreciate the way you have pulled together to help the company respond to this difficult economic environment. There’s no doubt that these are very challenging times. But together, we are making the right choices to ensure that we will continue to deliver great products and position ourselves for strong future growth and profitability.

Thank you for your continued hard work, commitment, and focus.

Steve

2009-05-05 :: email :: twitter :: facebook :: google+

Comments

Er nennt das Kind wenigstens beim Namen.

Roland Leißl, 2009-05-05 16:55

One of the IT industry's biggest problems is that it is very bad at sustaining its own skills ecology - there's an awful lot of wastage of talent.

Case in point - if you're a Windows Vista driver developer (very likely) being made redundant, who else is gonna hire you?

Linux .... dot com?!

Paul Erwin, 2009-05-05 19:28

Roland, ja, gute Sache, nicht so wie IBM mit "resource actions" rumzueiern.

Volker Weber, 2009-05-05 20:58

I doubt very much whether driver developers should feel worried, whether they're working on Vista drivers or not. Writing drivers is a specialized niche area, I'd be more worried if I was a recent graduate working on things like demo programs for Direct X ;-)

I'd say a driver developer would more likely move to a hardware company for paid work, Creative could probably do with some more talented driver developers IMO!

Alan Parker, 2009-05-05 21:46

"With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010."
OK, let's say all the fired people got $5.000.- each month*. What does MS save frome firing them in one year? 12x5k=300.000.000, that's 300 million $**. MS had a net gain of $2.98 billion in the third quarter of 2009! (http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY09/earn_rel_q3_09.mspx)
Come on explain it to me! Give me the cafeteria bills of those 5000 people! Tell me that I have to calculate more then one year! Well if that economic downturn lasts for more then the next 3-4 years we will have real troubles. But I do not see the need to fire 5000 employees right now in the case of MS.

*propably they got much less, but I do not know!
**for such charity amounts you can't feed a CEO for long...

Und für die deutsch-sprachigen hier: Der Fisch stinkt immer vom Kopf!

"Roland, ja, gute Sache, nicht so wie IBM mit "resource actions" rumzueiern."
Endlich mal einer der Klartext spricht, was? Vorsicht...

Philipp Neata, 2009-05-06 03:15

For US$400 million they could keep those employees for $80K yearly, and use them to write Windows 8 from the bottom up so that it finally works properly!

John Deltuvia, 2009-05-06 15:45

Don't worry Steve, create a bigger license jungle so your customers may bleed a little more...

Patrick Kwinten, 2009-05-07 08:27

-Don't worry Steve, create a bigger license jungle so your customers may bleed a little more...

Prehaps they can take inspiration for the PVU licensing , now updated with 5500series cpu at 70pr core

Flemming Riis, 2009-05-08 02:31