
Microsoft is laying off thousands in a major global sales reorganization - gk1
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/02/microsoft-is-laying-off-thousands-of-staff/
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apapli
Microsoft have been very successful in transitioning their commercial clients
to Office365 in Australia. Their focus is now probably on growing Azure as
fast as possible, as well as other key areas such as Power BI and Dynamics365.
And of course doubling down on building out their developer ecosystem, where
they lost so much mindshare under Ballmer for the better part of a decade at
least.

Not suprised to read this, they probably have a bunch of folk still selling
their "old tech" and need to move them on (or reskill, where there are job
openings).

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ams6110
They can see the writing on the wall. For both consumers and business users, a
PC with a full OS is a liability compared to a lightweight client machine and
cloud services (either hosted in Azure or on-premises).

The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s. Remember client-server?
Only now, it's practical. The universal client (web browser) is all most users
need. The nightmare of managing local installations of the client software is
gone. Management of user PCs, drivers, updates, dealing with malware, is all
going to be a thing of the past.

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balls187
> The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s

Try late 60's with time-sharing.

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ams6110
True, but that's more like the web of 10 years ago when the client side was
dumb and everything was processed and rendered on the server.

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Theodores
Reminds me of the time I visited Microsoft's 'campus' in the UK - in a posh
business park near to Reading, with nice views over the Thames.

I was expecting the place to be filled with boffins and assorted geniuses, but
instead there were sales account managers for things like Microsoft Golf -
didn't realise that you would have regional sales executives, e.g. for the
'south west of England' for such products. Then there were bean counters with
licencing to get right, but no 'boffins'.

I felt that I had accidentally been on the 'Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B;
for the day.

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Spearchucker
Thames Valley Park is a sales & marketing office. There's a consulting
services presence there too, but that really just supports sales & marketing.
They do some cool stuff sometimes in the Microsoft Technology Centre though.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
They used to do product development but nowadays it's all sales and marketing.
The game testers the other commenter is talking about is centralized testing
for Microsoft's remaining game studios. It's not very 'posh' either, at least
when I was there, quite dated 90s looking offices. I think Microsoft
development in general seems to heavily focused in basically the US and India.
Exceptions of course, there's acquisitions like Skype and plenty of other
examples dotted around but this place is hardly a 'campus' compared to Redmond
or IDC.

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nailer
There's really no reason for an SME to be running their own servers at this
point. The folks selling SBS-type solutions need to re-engage their customers
as Azure salespeople with an SME focus.

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locusm
That depends on bandwidth, onprem makes sense when all you have is ADSL with
less than 1Mbps up.

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nailer
You're right, I was being a little myopic: first world countries except
Australia should be cloud focused, otherwise onprem.

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dom0
Many owners of SME expressed _a lot of_ distrust towards "cloud" offerings.
Even they are somewhat aware of industrial espionage and the risks of giving
away control of central company assets like that. Microsoft tries to appease
these concerns by e.g. having European companies control European operations
(e.g. Telekom Cloud = Azure run by DTAG), but it doesn't seem to work that
well — folks still assume that US courts and agencies have full access.

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Spooky23
You're one payment away from losing everything. Nobody is going to shutdown a
government or large company -- but will happpily shrug and wipe out a SMB.

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nraynaud
do you think this flood of suits will create an bunch of companies whose
business model relie on the menace of a licensing compliance audit?

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Spooky23
No, now the model is to sell subscriptions that you don't use, instead of
shelf ware software.

The beauty of that is by underutilizing infrastructure, they get to enhance
the services margins. The ugly is that you're always going to be in a vicious
circle where you buy lots of bundled services that your service provider
doesn't want you to use.

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yuhong
My personal favorite is Server 2003 custom support (I am pretty sure custom
support was never intended to make as much revenue as it did):

[https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/6b79sw/custom_su...](https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/6b79sw/custom_support_and_ms_quarterly_earnings_rsysadmin/)

Twitter by Pinboard:

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/863410684192845825](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/863410684192845825)

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perseusprime11
Azure is a solid product but if they get complacent, Google can clearly
overtake them. Google has been pouring a lot of money and hiring industry
leaders into thier cloud offering. They will use Tensor flow and bake it into
all their cloud offerings. Microsoft has maybe a year to focus and get Azure
to be a clear #2.

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thoughtexprmnt
This makes sense. The financial future of Microsoft is dependent upon the
continued success of Office 365, Azure, and Xbox. Everything else, probably
including Windows OS itself, should be viewed as a distraction.

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mtgx
Hopefully this also means a reduction in bribes to national governments'
ministers, but I doubt it.

