Microsoft to Eliminate 10,000 Jobs Before the End of March

A slowdown has hit Microsoft’s core business. 

In response, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said it would eliminate 10,000 workers in a blog post entitled Focusing on our short- and long-term opportunity

We’re living through times of significant change, and as I meet with customers and partners, a few things are clear. First, as we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less. We’re also seeing organizations in every industry and geography exercise caution as some parts of the world are in a recession and other parts are anticipating one. At the same time, the next major wave of computing is being born with advances in AI, as we’re turning the world’s most advanced models into a new computing platform.

This is the context in which we as a company must strive to deliver results on an ongoing basis, while investing in our long-term opportunity. I’m confident that Microsoft will emerge from this stronger and more competitive, but it requires us to take actions grounded in three priorities. 

First, we will align our cost structure with our revenue and where we see customer demand. Today, we are making changes that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce by 10,000 jobs through the end of FY23 Q3. 

Second, we will continue to invest in strategic areas for our future, meaning we are allocating both our capital and talent to areas of secular growth and long-term competitiveness for the company, while divesting in other areas.

And third, we will treat our people with dignity and respect, and act transparently. These decisions are difficult, but necessary. 

If it appears things are accelerating to the downside, it’s because things are accelerating to the downside. 

Meanwhile, Signs Say Industrial Production Has Peaked and so a Recession is Imminent

This post originated at MishTalk.Com.

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8dots
8dots
1 year ago
King Salomon, the son of King David, was the wisest man who ever lived until Satya. The R : we sent $10K to every shingle mums, they
belong to us. // The D were furious. They change the rules and the accounting : shingle mums belong to us. // King Salomon : cut.
R and D : that’s fine with us !
footwedge
footwedge
1 year ago
Reply to  8dots
????????
8dots
8dots
1 year ago
Reply to  footwedge
President Trump, a former democrat, tried to steal Shingle mums voters, sending them $10K, to win the 2020 election.
Billy
Billy
1 year ago
I’m guessing big tech is laying off employees and will replace them with gig workers.
8dots
8dots
1 year ago
In Nov 22 2021 MSFT ceo cashed in options and stocks, collecting in one day over $500,000,000. Since Nov 22 2021 NDX retraced 62% of the
move from 2020 low. After a lower high, things might get worse, breaching the lows, thanks to Satya Nargila.
Lisa_Hooker
Lisa_Hooker
1 year ago
Reply to  8dots
With $500,000,000 one can purchase a nice island.
And furnish it.
And buy a nice ship.
And a boat or two.
TexasTim65
TexasTim65
1 year ago
Reply to  Lisa_Hooker
Little St James is available and only 125 million but I bet you could get for 100 and Gates will visit regularly 😉
Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
1 year ago
Reply to  Lisa_Hooker
With the latest billionaire boom, the supply of islands is tight. One billion gets you a rocky outcrop in the middle of an ocean.
We printed as if the whole Milky Way was ours.
shamrock
shamrock
1 year ago
Unfortunately these layoff reports aren’t affecting unemployment claims, only 190,000 initial claims this week. Historically low number. That should keep the rate hikes coming.
MarkraD
MarkraD
1 year ago
They’re sorting wheat from chaff…
So, does this mean, when I call MS support I have to wait longer, but likely to get someone that actually DOES know the answer to my question?
Dubronik
Dubronik
1 year ago
Reply to  MarkraD
You are calling the wrong tech support…You suppose to wait for the MS call which gladly will remotely log in and “fix” your PC with your consent… of course!! 🙂
Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett
1 year ago
Microsoft in July 2022 announced a layoff of 1% (1800) of work force.
How many more announcements to come?
shamrock
shamrock
1 year ago
Compare and contrast that layoff announcement with Musk’s get the eff out twitter layoffs. lol.
hamsaplo
hamsaplo
1 year ago
Once a month on a Tuesday I get dozens of fixes to my Windows software. If my PC succeeds in restarting without me having to intervene in some way, there is no difference to the performance of my machine. These are “security flaws”. I still cannot shut down my PC after the last fix.
How about MS making an operating system that just works.
I remember 50 years ago being an apprentice in England at a place that made measurement and control equipment. They laid off a large number of people (a critical mass, evidently) who then pooled their resources and built a company that beat the original company. They still exist. I am truly surprised that MS still exists. Nadella’s words are just typical executive vomit.
lamlawindy
lamlawindy
1 year ago
Reply to  hamsaplo
How about MS making an operating system that just works.
It’s already been made, though not by MSFT: it’s called Linux.
Yooper
Yooper
1 year ago
Reply to  lamlawindy
Exactly. My family and parents have been using Kubuntu LTS for years, and even on old equipment runs just as fast as the first day I installed it. I use MS only at work because I have to.
KidHorn
KidHorn
1 year ago
Reply to  hamsaplo
I’ve been hearing the same nonsense for decades. No one makes an OS like windows. Every major company and government runs on windows. Because nothing else is nearly as good.
They have a lot of updates because their systems and applications do way more than the competition.
Siliconguy
Siliconguy
1 year ago
Reply to  KidHorn

Microsoft’s systems do no more than Linux. The issue is the applications. Windows is the largest ecosystem so it’s the most profitable to write software for, or at least the quickest to generate a return on the investment.

Windows is the largest ecosystem because of illegal business practices back in the 1990s, for which they were dragged into court and had their hands duly slapped. But that was a price Gates was willing to pay to get the monopoly securely entrenched.
KidHorn
KidHorn
1 year ago
Reply to  Siliconguy
They don’t do more than Linux? That’s absurd. I used to hear the same about unix, OS2, and now linux. if Linux is free and it’s so great, why isn’t it used more? It’s because it only does a fraction of what windows does and it’s extremely hard to get a lot of things working correctly. The only reason it gets any use is because it’s free. And what illegal business practices were done in the 90s?
TexasTim65
TexasTim65
1 year ago
Reply to  KidHorn
“and it’s extremely hard to get a lot of things working correctly”
That’s why everyone uses Windows. It’s why so many use Apple products too.
99% of users are not techies and just need it to work as simply as possible without needing to know much about the technology. Microsoft was the first to recognize this and Apple perfected it.
prumbly
prumbly
1 year ago
Reply to  TexasTim65
Most people don’t use Windows, they use other operating systems. Fewer than 1 in 3 still use Windows.
KidHorn
KidHorn
1 year ago
Reply to  Siliconguy
I was around when windows first came out and was a windows developer for many years. Do you want to know why windows was so much more successful than everything else and buried OS2 and Unix?
I’ll tell you why. Because MS was the only company that understood that you couldn’t just have a good OS. You had to have good applications to to run on it. And in order to have good applications, you had to have good development tools. IBM didn’t understand this. Windows development tools were far better than OS2 development tools. The OS2 development environment used to crash constantly. Visual C didn’t. The windows SDK was far better than the OS2 one. It was much better documented too. And MS came out with word and excel when windows 3 came out. Windows 3 was a huge step forward. Much better than the predecessors. Lotus 123 and Word perfect decided to go with OS2. They were by far the leading applications at the time and the decision killed them. UNIX was way too complex. Windows was far simpler.
It had nothing to do with illegal business practices. If it did, every company would have done the same. Get a grip on reality.
Lisa_Hooker
Lisa_Hooker
1 year ago
Reply to  KidHorn
Those Micro$oft folks are geniuses.
Did you enjoy working with Windows Millennium Edition back in the day?
Just asking for a friend.
Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
1 year ago
Reply to  Siliconguy
Why did IBM’s OS/2 project lose to Microsoft. Only forgot to mention Bill’s family connections inside IBM.
KidHorn
KidHorn
1 year ago
Sour grapes coming from someone in charge of OS2 development. IBM created a crappy OS. It was really slow and crashed a lot. Their development tools were terrible. I think their environment was called C SET from what I remember. You would learn to go to a dialog box and click things in a specific order or it would crash and exit. MS used to say OS2 development success was measured in the number of lines of code written. MS success was determined by the number of unnecessary lines of code removed.
Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
1 year ago
Reply to  KidHorn
Maybe so, but Bill sold DOS to IBM, no GUI.
The incompetence of IBM execs was second to none, since they were in every business.
No chance that an unknown MS would have a chance with business suites.
Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
1 year ago
Reply to  Siliconguy
The Linux dumbfkry didn’t help. How many graphical systems Linux has?
KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon…
Bill in his evil incarnation couldn’t have been more creative.
Lisa_Hooker
Lisa_Hooker
1 year ago
Those are just window managers and the important thing is you can change them to what you like.
With Micro$oft the user interface changes beneath your feet every few years, like it or not.
I never understood spending money on something I didn’t like.
Maximus_Minimus
Maximus_Minimus
1 year ago
Reply to  Lisa_Hooker
If you’re application developer, it matters what graphical toolkit you learn.
With 3, which one do you go with to reach 1-2% of the market – for free.
No business is gonna touch a system not developed with business discipline.
TexasTim65
TexasTim65
1 year ago
Reply to  hamsaplo
If you don’t connect your PC to the internet you never need any updates and it ‘just works’.
I have plenty of virtual machines that never update and they work just fine many years later.
Connecting to the internet is the reason we need security patches.
rktbrkr
rktbrkr
1 year ago
Microsoft is so 90s, I hardly ever think of them anymore.
Jojo
Jojo
1 year ago
Given MS’s intent to invest heavily in OpenAI and their latest product ChatGPT, perhaps they can begin letting the AI’s start to generate code, removing the need for humans?. What could go wrong? [lol]
——–
Here come the robot doctors
18 Jan 2023
ChatGPT, the generative AI juggernaut, is getting a lot smarter when it comes to health care.
Why it matters: A lot of clinical diagnoses and decisions could someday be made by machines, rather than by human doctors.
Driving the news: ChatGPT recently passed all three parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, although just barely, as part of a recent research experiment.
• As the researchers note, second-year medical students often spend hundreds of hours preparing for Part 1, while Part 3 usually is taken by medical school graduates.
Felix_Mish
Felix_Mish
1 year ago
According to this chart:
Microsoft last laid off a similar ~5% of their people between 2014 and 2015. 2014, like 2022 was a extra-big hiring year. If you eyeball a smooth curve, you’ll see that 2015 and, now, apparently, 2023, are back in line with that smooth curve.
BTW, apparently half of Microsoft’s 200,000+ people are outside the US. One might wonder where and who are going to be let go in this round.
KidHorn
KidHorn
1 year ago
Reply to  Felix_Mish
This is mostly an over-hiring correction.
Lisa_Hooker
Lisa_Hooker
1 year ago
Reply to  KidHorn
Or perhaps a Welchian purging of the least “efficient.”
Dubronik
Dubronik
1 year ago
Reply to  Felix_Mish
lay off: probably the ones you mentioned in paragraph 2.

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