
Cringely suggests job losses at Microsoft should be ten times greater - naish
http://www.cringely.com/
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JoelSutherland
I am failing to see a point in this post. Would it have killed him to write:

Microsoft should lay off 50,000 employees because...[his point].

The closest he comes is this:

 _Instead of 5000 positions, the company should drop 50,000. It should decide
what businesses it is in and close or sell the rest. It should be a lot better
than it is at running its true core – the muscle that’s been hiding beneath
all that fat._

But that omits a _why_.

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tptacek
I'm not sure you read the whole article; it's mostly about how Microsoft is
overstaffed, and that if you conservatively assume a 10 year average tenure
for FTEs at Microsoft, they're losing a multiple of their layoff size every
year just in turnover.

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mlinsey
That answers the question of "How can Microsoft get by with so many more
layoffs" but not the question of why it would be a good idea. Specifically,
the author identifies Microsoft's real long-term problem as the growing
irrelevance of the PC and MS' inability to control the various markets that
are supplanting it. How getting rid of half of the employees in the company
would fix that problem; I'm not sure.

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tptacek
One inference I made easily from the article: if most of what Microsoft is
doing is increasingly irrelevant, then they may be heavily staffing projects
that are not strategically valuable.

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mtkd
Don't have a lot of time for Cringely any more.

However there is a strong argument for breaking Microsoft up in to smaller
units - gaming, office, OS and hardware.

If broken up I think the individual units would have a lot more drive, focus
and identity.

It must be quite depressing being a creative developer in a company that does
so much you can never feel you'll make a difference.

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old-gregg
It's funny how consistently, for such a long time, year after year I see this
as-a-matter-of-facty drops of _"... when desktop disappears ..."_ into
sentences. Seems like everybody else but me surely knows that it will, and
understands why. I can hear Eric Cartman whispering into my year _"You're so
stuuuuupeeed."_

~~~
axod
For several people, it already has. What you use certainly doesn't matter as
much as it used to, as long as it has a browser.

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leed25d
Cringely is a stooge for The Man.

