
Microsoft lays off 2,100, axes Silicon Valley research - Garbage
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/microsoft-redundancies-idINL1N0RJ25920140918
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nostromo
The logic of spreading out layoffs over the corse of an entire year escapes
me. Particularly when it's the first year of a new CEO. What are they
thinking?

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ArkyBeagle
I have to wonder if they're not trying to speed up the rate of voluntary
exits.

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jedanbik
Definitely. If you quit, you don't get unemployment insurance benefits.

Microsoft is trading morale for money.

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judk
That doesn't make sense. People would either get new jobs or coast till
layoff. No one preemptively quits to do nothing because they fear a layoff.

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ArkyBeagle
I would not think people would simply quit. They'd basically start to look for
a job to beat the effect of all those other people being in the water. Of
course this is no great secret so it might already be as if those people were
in the water.

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mikeryan
(this thread is a dupe)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336954](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336954)

~~~
aaronbrethorst
That thread is also a dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336033](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336033),
but it really doesn't matter in the end.

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funkyy
I have been to one of the campuses few times (working as a contractor with
newly transfered employees) - they said themselves - Microsoft was like
communist country:

-extraordinary social

-very low performance targets

-completely guaranteed work

-overspending on servicing employees (renting them cars, providing accommodations, even giving out quick loans to those that needed)

This was hurting the market, finally seems to be over.

I wonder how much of the workforce was employed in Nokia directly though.

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xnull
It's weird. We have this notion in America that corporations are (or are
supposed to be) efficient. They're not. Markets are if you grant a series of
tenuous assumptions. Markets are the fair efficient competition between unfair
and inefficient firms.

~~~
enraged_camel
Yeah, if anything, corporations are islands of communism where resources are
distributed by central planners (i.e. executive management). And it has been
proven over and over that central planning is a horribly inefficient way to
distribute resources.

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jjoonathan
If central planning is so inefficient, why are centrally planned mega-
corporations beating the crap out of ad-hoc networks of smaller companies in
retail (for example)?

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abfan1127
its a combination of economies of scale and they can force regulations too
costly to compete at on on smaller scales, which I suppose is another economy
of scale.

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acomjean
When I was at IBM research last century, we thought MS research was doing
awesome things, but unable to get products out. There appeared to be some fear
that MS would start producing stuff from their research. (MS and IBM were
competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena)

I hope the New England R&D (NERD) which has been very generous with allowing
software groups to use their space to meet continues to do so.

Short sited and a sad day.

~~~
swartkrans
When I read about the immense amount of money that has reportedly gone into
research at companies like Microsoft, billions of dollars, and seen very
little ever come of it, I can't help but think maybe they would have been
better of just making it a venture capital fund. I don't think R&D departments
have the incentive entrepreneurs have in actually making research useful.
Google X stands out as different, and I think that's because Google seems to
be using it for marketing as much as research. We've yet to see any game
changers come out of there, unless you think Google Glass was a success. The
self-driving automobiles are interesting and will probably lead to something,
and the air drones too. It's probably not all a wash.

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tiffanyh
The dollar figures for "R&D" are really deceiving. Don't forget the "D" stand
for development.

For a company the size of Microsoft, who has 130k employees, it's not
unrealistic to imagine 40k employees are developers and/or product management.

At an average fully loaded cost of $150k per developer x 40k developers = $6
Billion.

So all the cost to just maintain their EXISTING product set, in this
illustration, might be $6B ... none of which is "research"

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bkjelden
It seems that satellite campuses are particularly hard hit with this round. I
wonder if there is a desire at the top to move more things back to redmond.

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lotsofmangos
Being optimistic, this will presumably generate loads of new companies.

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bunkydoo
How else do you think they got the cash to buy Minecraft?

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chetanahuja
It's a real shock in this day and age of intense competition for talent to let
go of such a large number of talented (they must be, to be there in the first
place) engineers (or is it scientists) in the heart of silicon valley. To me
that's a sign of a company that doesn't see a way to grow new products via
creative efforts of it's employees. Oh well, I guess it's good news for the
startups who could much better use the that same talent. (Edit - to remove
what might have sounded like a recruiting pitch)

