Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#301

Post by roc » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:12 PM UTC

silverbax88 wrote: post #85

kabdib wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock is up over 45 now . . . Getting rid of dead wood is a great idea. Tons of middle management there, just sitting for years and causing obstructive damage.

A friend of mine who has been CFO of a couple of Fortune 500 companies once told me that layoffs always drive a stock price up, and that it's also one of the single biggest proofs that Wall Street analysts have no idea how to run a real business. He explained that any company who could shed a massive amount of its workforce within a year, or all at once, is a red flag for massive internal problems. At the time we had…

> "it's also one of the single biggest proofs that Wall Street analysts have no idea how to run a real business."

While it sounds like your friend definitely knows how to run a real business, he/you may want to re-asses Wall Street's real business: it isn't "running companies", it isn't "building value" and it sure isn't "giving away solid analysis for free".

They make money off trade-activity that generates short-term returns.

The sell trades, not stocks. Not unlike eBay. They can and do profit from irrational/emotional behavior and they have no qualms about designing their business to fuel and leverage those behaviors for increased returns.

If 2007 taught us anything, it should be that Wall Street is more than happy to tell you whatever you need to hear to generate predictable trades -- more than happy to tell business news channels whatever will generate predictable trades -- even those they know those trades to be bad and foolish to the extent that they personally bet against them.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#302

Post by kyllo » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:13 PM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #287

kyllo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in any case, if Microsoft were suddenly to chuck 30 years of their work in the bin and go all open-source, wouldn't that just transform them into a services company? Isn't that exactly what they have said they are trying to do? Become a "Devices and Services" company instead of a software company?

Hadn't thought of that, but I wonder if it is just terminology? How can they be a cloud provider without an OS?

They could just as easily run their cloud services on a Linux or BSD based OS. Nothing about a "Devices and Services" company requires a proprietary OS.

I think it really just shows that they aren't that serious about actually pivoting their business model. Their leadership aspires to be a devices and services company because they look at their competitors and see that Apple is making money from devices, and Google and Amazon are making money from services, so they think they need to compete in those fields. But they're not going to truly pivot because that would require spinning off or killing their core, cash cow business model, which is a PC operating system and a suite of productivity software products.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#303

Post by mynameisvlad » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:20 PM UTC

woi13 wrote: post #237

throwaway0010 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the job is unnecessary why would it be a good idea to "save" it?

i'm not at Microsoft. But, think from prospective that someone could be having life event. Some put years worth of efforts that including physical, mental energy into MS ( or previous Nokia ) , planned something and now potential job loss could be trigger to disaster.

Boo hoo. That's how the world turns. Microsoft is not in it to save jobs, it's in it to make money. They have absolutely no obligation to keep someone if they don't need them anymore, just like any other company. It sucks that people are being laid off, but that just comes with having any job. You have to realize that at some point, it is going to end. It will suck when it does, but life goes on.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#304

Post by IBM » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:34 PM UTC

discordance wrote: post #123

Some context Microsoft head count: 127k Apple head count: 80k Google head count: 50k Facebook head count: 7k

Apple has 50,250 employees in the US but 26k of them are in retail. Apple is very small for its market cap.

https://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#305

Post by taurath » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:41 PM UTC

incision wrote: post #228

sanxiyn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, survey of mergers found that while most mergers fail, Cisco is an outlier making successful mergers one after another. It is said that Cisco analyzed successful and unsuccessful mergers and does data-driven, evidence-based decision making. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/hard-facts-mergers.htm...

Interesting. 'Cisco figured out that mergers between similar sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity.' I recall asking people there about why they didn't acquire certain companies that I thought would make a lot of sense from a technical / product perspective. The typical answer was right in line with that quote - that Cisco stays away bigger co…

So, we should let the comcast/time warner cable deal go through because there's a good chance they'll implode?

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#306

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:42 PM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #128

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subject: Important Company-wide Announcement Dear Employees, For our business to continue running, we must reduce the number of staff. This is an unfortunate but also inevitable reality. [insert details of layoff here] [insert honest platitudes] Senior management wishes all of you the best of luck, and has every confidence that you will be even more successful at your next job.

The only bit I would disagree with is, "For our business to continue running..." Last year, Microsoft made over $20 billion profit on almost $80 billion in revenue. The truth is that Microsoft has accumulated many useless employees over the years, and they could be even more profitable by laying off those people.

Yes, but at that point it's not a "running business" but a charity.

Pruning all the carefully hidden useless employees is a massive effort, getting rid of a department that is longer relevant is a minor effort. Expecting them to undertake the massive effort for the appearance of fairness is unrealistic.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#307

Post by kaonashi » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:42 PM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #286

kaonashi wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 20% of the people I work with use Windows. None of them are developers.

Are you a graphic design shop by any chance?

Nope, a .com

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#308

Post by rmk » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:45 PM UTC

incision wrote: post #228

sanxiyn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, survey of mergers found that while most mergers fail, Cisco is an outlier making successful mergers one after another. It is said that Cisco analyzed successful and unsuccessful mergers and does data-driven, evidence-based decision making. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/hard-facts-mergers.htm...

Interesting. 'Cisco figured out that mergers between similar sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity.' I recall asking people there about why they didn't acquire certain companies that I thought would make a lot of sense from a technical / product perspective. The typical answer was right in line with that quote - that Cisco stays away bigger co…

That's not really true. They bought SourceFire last year for a few billion.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#309

Post by Scuds » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:48 PM UTC

This whole thing is a world apart from the kids living six to a room in hacker hostels churning out MVVM frameworks for Erlang.

Re: Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

#310

Post by headgasket » Thu, Jul 17, 2014, 6:49 PM UTC

romanovcode wrote: post #298

headgasket wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply! (I also assume you are not my downvoter:-) I see the value of replacing the NT kernel by a bsd variant as this: you free ride on a lot of work done by other people. Us software heads have decided we wanted the hard core kernel and compiler engineering to be open source, circa 1990. We've won philosophically, albeit we've lost economically, as the 18000 layoffs and the death of SUN, and transform…

>as I will not pay or lock myself in MSSQL Then don't use MSSQL? Are you really that stupid to think that C# can only use MSSQL as its database?

no I'm very well aware of npgsql, in fact I have fixed bugs and contributed to that project. But I seem to be stupid enough to keep commenting here and loosing karma! (I lost over 15 karma points over this post since the morning, I guess MS's windows NT kernel is still going strong in the hearts and minds of the folks hanging out at hacker news. :-)

cheers! WINNT is a cool piece of technology, I just think it's redundant and expensive for MS; I want MS to prevail, I have friends that work there, I hope they won't be affected by the cuts, please give me my karma back! :-))