
Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs - whiteacid
http://recode.net/2014/07/17/ax-falls-at-microsoft-as-company-looks-to-cut-18000-jobs-this-year/
======
pierreio
So MS Bought Nokia and ~30k employees for ~$7.2 billion last April.

3 months later, MS may now be firing ~half of the Nokia group. The executives
who drove that catastrophic deal stay.

What a testament to how disastrous big M&A really is. Is there any large
acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years? I'd feel sorry if I was a
Nokia guy there, they pulled out the best non-Apple phone hardware in the last
years.

Probably also a good reminder for Blackberry - dont sell yourself and die
trying, it actually can't get worse.

~~~
sz4kerto
> Is there any large acquisition that succeeded in the last 10 years?

Yes, many. Think of the Lenovo-IBM deal -- massive success. The Facebook-
Whatsapp deal is 2.5x bigger than this acquisition, we'll see how that works
out (financially). Google-Youtube is a big one that can be considered as a big
success as well. Ebay-Paypal. FB-Instagram.

~~~
Thaxll
Facebook-Whatsapp are you serious?

~~~
nkozyra
One of these things is not like the others.

------
frou_dh

        Subject: Starting to Evolve Our Organization and Culture
    
        Body: Last week in my email to you I synthesized our strategic direction ...
    

Christ.

~~~
pxlpshr
Instead of writing "Christ", you should consider posting an email as if you
were the one newly responsible for a $364B company and a reduction in 18,000
jobs.

I'd be curious to see other people's management style from their armchair.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
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.

~~~
ggreer
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.

~~~
brational
"For our business to remain competitive... "

~~~
danielweber
"For your convenience, 15% of positions will be removed."

------
k2enemy
And now, every day for a year, everyone gets to wake up and wonder if this is
the day that they will get laid off.

Why can't they wait and make the announcement once they know who they will
eliminate and do it in one swift action? Why put people in limbo for a year?

~~~
outside1234
Microsoft employee here: I took this exactly the opposite way. I know I'm
valuable, I know many others aren't (sorry: being honest) and this is a good
thing from my perspective because at Microsoft we are finally facing reality
and getting the right people in place.

My only gripe is that the layoffs are not larger - we need about 20% of the
marketing folks and 20% of the program managers that we currently have. I
would cut deeply in those disciplines as well and then Page-style cut all of
the deadwood non-strategic low-revenue projects (and there are a lot of them).

Laying off Terry Myerson (Windows) and Kevin Turner (chief hacker culture
killer) would be a great improvement as well - they are both cancers.

~~~
ww520
Letting 80% marketing and PM go? Wow. I thought PM are pretty good in
Microsoft.

~~~
72deluxe
Didn't Ballmer's reorganisation mean that there was a triad of developer,
project manager and tester working together? That would mean one project
manager for each developer wouldn't it?

Or am I wrong? Has that changed?

~~~
ehaughee
We don't have one PM/test per dev, no. My team is currently something like 8
devs, 3 testers, 3 PMs. There was an internal shift to change the test/dev
ratio to something like 2/3 or 1/3 (I can't remember exactly) instead of
matching it. I don't know of a team in my division that has a 1:1 for PM or
test to dev.

~~~
72deluxe
Thanks for the info. Very informative, considering I work in a tiny company
and we have 3 developers, with 1 (me) working on the bit that people actually
use daily (the entire GUI bit on multiple platforms).

I used to work in a larger team in a different company but we only had 1 PM
who frustrated us all, sadly. How do they balance 3 PMs? Do they argue between
themselves?

~~~
ehaughee
I can only speak for my team obviously but our product has quite a bit of
complexity from both within (features) and without (partner contracts). There
is enough work that the PMs typically own different aspects of the project and
don't have many chances to step on each other's toes.

------
forgotAgain
Too many words. He needs to drop the self absorbed thought leader babble and
communicate in a straight forward manner.

~~~
mavdi
Indeed. None of the words in his company wide email meant 18000 job cuts to
me. Just a neutral line of babble in that email. Terrible leadership to start
with

~~~
maccard
So, how do you tell a workforce of X people that 18000 jobs are going to be
cut?

~~~
meowface
Sugarcoating layoffs is one thing, and is something just about anyone would
do. But sugarcoating it to such a ridiculous extent, while not really saying
anything at all, is ridiculous.

~~~
maccard
He explicitly states that 18000 jobs will be cut in that email. My question
still stands, how do you tell a company the size of microsoft that 18000 jobs
are going to be cut, while still maintaining a shred of integrity? If you know
so much better, please share with us.

------
sz4kerto
Stephen Elop's email on the same topic, but focused on ex-Nokians:

[http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/news/press/2014/jul14/07-17an...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/news/press/2014/jul14/07-17announcement2.aspx)

tl,dr;: \- Nokia X is dead \- other Devices departments are not affected/the
effect is limited

~~~
kentlyons
It isn't just that Nokia X is dead. This says they're killing of all of what
use to be "Smart devices" \- which is/was the feature phone division. So that
includes the Asha series, etc.

~~~
sirkneeland
Mobile Phones was the feature phone division. Smart Devices was the smartphone
division.

All an academic point since now they're just going to be "the phones division"

------
brador
Looking forward to the wave of cool startups this will create!

~~~
domiono
Interesting, especially since a severage package of $30k-$50k or how much ever
it is, is basically like a seed funding round for each employee that is let
go. Could be interesting...Microsoft Mafia :)

------
smackfu
Has anyone been inside the process for determining the number of layoffs in a
situation like this? Is the goal to cut payroll to a certain number, or what?

~~~
kasey_junk
I worked for a time doing "transitional project management" read "once we
acquire you, figure out what we are keeping and jettison the rest". For a
company that wasn't the size of Microsoft but grew through acquisition to be
quite large.

In that particular case, which may or may not have any similarity to this
incident, layoffs were determined in 2 ways

A) if you had 2 redundant or similar operational centers you got rid of the
most expensive one unless there was some compelling reason not to (huge client
demanded they stay, or they were more expensive but dramatically more
efficient)

B) technology centers the goal was to integrate what had to be integrated as
fast as possible. 80% of the time this meant literally telling people they
wouldn't have the same functionality after the acquisition and getting rid of
the entire support team. Occasionally, you would find some piece of technology
that was great and easily integrated into the rest of the systems and that
support team would be given good terms to stay until that was done. Very
rarely you would find some piece of technology that was newly vital and hard
to integrate, in that case you'd keep a skeleton crew to keep it operational,
but you knew that it wasn't going to get any new resources and if it ever
become non-vital that team was gone as well.

For point A) above, I've literally seen the decision come down to the cost per
square foot of the office space. I've never been in a situation where they had
a predetermined number they had to get to though. The number was a natural
calculation based on the above.

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

~~~
IBM
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/](https://www.apple.com/about/job-
creation/)

~~~
thinkling
OTOH, Apple has how many indirect employees in China? 100,000+?

------
flurpitude
"Last week in my email to you I synthesized our strategic direction as a
productivity and platform company..."

Good old corporatespeak. Anaesthetize them with tedious bullshit so you never
have to say "You're fired."

------
shaydoc
This is a company with a net profit margin of 27.74% in Q1 2014.

~~~
Infinitesimus
Layoffs aren't always about profit though. In this case, it is more about
streamlining and making MS more agile

~~~
shaydoc
How does laying off 18,000 people make you more "agile" ? Products that sell
make you more "agile"... Its more a case of, we bought Nokia for their market,
but we don't need their staff!

~~~
Anderkent
> Products that sell make you more "agile"

Uh, no, being capable of designing things cooperatively rather than playing
political games and supporting status-quo is what makes you agile. Products
that sell are the effect, not the cause.

It's much easier with a smaller company, though I doubt that's the primary
motivation for the layoffs. More likely, they want to re-evaluate their
internal culture, fire people most out of sync with what they'd like the
culture to be and hire people that are more similar.

~~~
shaydoc
you are caviling over the ninth part of a hair, but yes you are right,
products that sell are the effect, not the cause.

you can't tell me there are not some seriously good staff among that 18,000.
Microsoft are a huge company, and very few are more successful than them.
Microsoft have the environment to allow things to flourish. IMHO Microsoft are
still ahead of the curve and agile, especially with Azure. Microsoft are
massive ultimately because what they have done to date has been hugely
successful. So its really a case of consuming Nokia.

------
sz4kerto
MSFT pre-market at $45 at the moment -- higher than anytime in the last
decade. There are big expectations towards Nadella -- we need to see
groundbreaking strategy changes to justify this. Exciting times.

~~~
chton
I'm not sure how this fits into a big strategy change. It mostly seems like
really eliminating redundancy, that's why most of the firings are in the Nokia
department. They've recently acquired that, so there are bound to be lots of
people there that do jobs that were already filled at Microsoft. That would be
more than enough to justify it, at least to stockholders.

~~~
anjc
He's talking about cultural alignment in the mail, and there's no reason to
assume that that's not the reasoning behind the Nokia layoffs. Acquisitions
and mergers are very difficult to get right, particularly in terms of culture.
If there's a cultural gap between the two companies, then the layoffs for the
acquirer probably make sense.

------
hyperliner
In startups, you can be gone at any time.

In large company, you can be gone at any time.

So, the lesson here is: prepare to be gone, and be gone before you are gone.

~~~
72deluxe
Very wise advice! Keep projects bubbling on the side in case this eventuality
hits! And live within your means.

------
matt_s
Looks like about 15% of their employees, although 10% will be former Nokia
folks.

This has to be part of a multi-year effort to reformat the company. I would
expect that there are going to be soft costs that have multi-year impacts.
People left behind having to take on more work without necessarily any
incentive.

With numbers this high, there will be some degree of randomness in the people
selected for the layoff. This will have long-term impacts on morale.

Microsoft has a ton of cash, right? Wouldn't it be smart for them to, once the
layoffs are over, incent people to perform in the "new culture"? Give their
key people more $, more responsibility, etc.?

------
JasonIpswitch
Anyone care to bet that within 18 months some Microsoft C-level will be
complaining about "lack of company loyalty" over something an employee has
done?

------
suls
"[..] In addition, we plan to have fewer layers of management, both top down
and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making. [..]"

At least on concrete and positive note in his email. Wondering if that tripled
the initial estimate of 6k cuts.

------
aikah
There was a previous thread on HN where some users were cheering for MS
saying,it was just fat trimming or "actually that's good news".

I dont wish it to happen to anyone. Being laid off is never "good news".

~~~
ertdfgcb
It's good news for Microsoft if that person was useless and slowing everything
down.

------
kstop
Yikes - "over the next 6 months" => MS will be a disaster area until 2015 as
people bicker and fight for a position on top of the human life raft.

------
samolang
That's almost 15% of the company.

------
sgibat
Is this going to bloat the Software Engineer market? Do we know what
percentage are developers?

~~~
bigdubs
From reading the email, I looks like the majority (~12k) of the cuts are in
the Nokia division, not sure how many of those are developers but I'd imagine
not the majority.

------
ivanche
"Following the Nokia acquisition, completed in April, Microsoft had roughly
127,104 employees[...]"

I don't have knowledge about managing a company, but is it at all possible to
efficiently lead 127000+ employees? Has MSFT become a non-manageable behemoth?

~~~
CSMastermind
There are lots of companies with more than 127,104 employees that manage just
fine. Boing across the street for instance. The reason for the cuts is two
fold. First, Microsoft acquired Nokia and they're going to let go of all of
most of the non-engineering staff, as well as a lot of the management. Second,
Microsoft just restructured itself. It used to run like a conglomerate with VP
essentially running their individual business like a fifedom ala the
organizational chart comic ([http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-
content/uploads/2012/08/or...](http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/wp-
content/uploads/2012/08/org_structure_google_microsoft_oracle_facebook_apple.png)).
Over the last 3 years there's been a series of high profile executives let go
with the intent of increasing cooperation between the divisions, then last
year the company restructured going from 9(?) divisions down to 4. As a result
there's a lot of redundant people and teams. This house cleaning is in part a
result of that.

------
jjindev
You know, companies with the size and wealth of MS sometimes employ people
just to have them NOT innovating elsewhere. Consider 18K smart people freed of
that as the bright side.

~~~
LunaSea
"bright"

~~~
jjindev
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUhlRoBL8M)

------
EGreg
This struck me: the layoffs are motivated by two outcomes, one of which is
"work simplification".

Automation eliminates jobs, I've said this for a while.

~~~
hnnewguy
> _Automation eliminates jobs_

Automation moves jobs around, it doesn't eliminate them.

~~~
EGreg
For that to happen, at least as many jobs would be created every time
something would be automated. Where is the proof?

------
sirkneeland
Attention Nokia (MS) workers: Nokia (Nokia) is hiring.

------
kitwalker12
they're also doing internal restructuring. a friend who works there tells me
they are doing away with the QA department and instead relying on unit tests &
developers to do the feature testing themselves. IMHO that's a good move. QA
departments in MS have moved to a position where every developer hands them
the dll to even test that it works at all.

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

------
solnyshok
That's another milestone achieved in Elop's grand plan to bring MS and Nokia
heads to the throne of Adobe.

------
pliptvo
I find it fascinating that there's not a single comment here regarding
industrial action.

18,000 people will have their jobs slashed just like that without any
resistance?

Instead they're just meant to leave with a smile on their face knowing that
it's in the supposed benefit of their former employer?

I'm sure Nadella finds the decision to send 18,000 people to the job market
much more 'difficult' than they'll find it out there.

~~~
sgedljsgejkl
Do you even know what the definition of at will employment is?

~~~
pliptvo
"On the one hand, the doctrine of at-will employment has been heavily
criticized for its severe harshness upon employees.[39] It has also been
criticized as predicated upon flawed assumptions about the inherent
distribution of power and information in the employee-employer
relationship.[40] On the other hand, conservative scholars in the field of law
and economics such as Professors Richard A. Epstein[41] and Richard Posner[42]
credit employment at will as a major factor underlying the strength of the
U.S. economy. Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-
will_employment#Controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-
will_employment#Controversy)

Well I'm certainly not a conservative.

I think the second point is true. An at-will contract (or lack thereof) is
essentially skewed towards the free will of the employer in a way that is
massively to the detriment, as these cuts prove, to that of the employee.

At will might be the employment norm in America, but assuming a sizeable
number of Nokia's workers are actually Finnish where they have far stronger
employment laws, I would wonder whether this is all even legal.

------
VikingCoder
It's a bad time to try to get a job. You'll be competing against all them ex-
Microsoft folks.

------
farrel
That's a lot of unemployed Fins.

~~~
kiiski
Apparently about a thousand.
[http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/business/11224-microsoft-
plans-c...](http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/business/11224-microsoft-plans-
cutting-1-000-jobs-in-finland.html)

------
dschiptsov
So, finally, reality reasserted itself, and despite millions spent for
brainwashing, Windows is already belongs to the past, the very same way Nokia
phones are..)

~~~
72deluxe
How many people do you know using Windows?

How many of your work colleagues use Windows at work?

Does it really "belong to the past"?

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

~~~
72deluxe
Are you a graphic design shop by any chance?

~~~
kaonashi
Nope, a .com

~~~
72deluxe
OK! That's pretty vague, and could be anything!

~~~
kaonashi
About ~50% developers/technology, ~30% marketing, ~20% customer service.

------
synergies
CTRL+F synergies

~~~
thejdude
Is that an Outlook Ctrl-F or a Find Ctrl-F?

------
justinzollars
Microsoft Metro inspired the new airbnb design.

------
dickinurass
tl;dr - looks like a bunch of Internal corporate bullshit I don't care about

microsoft employes some brilliant people but maybe in the future they should
actually think about what they products are trying to push on people so they
stop fucking themselves over constantly?

------
mavdi
Ouch...

------
Systemic33
I'm not very impressed with the choice of Nadella so far, he seems too deep
into MS culture to be able to see clearly. But only time will tell, it's still
to early to give a verdict.

~~~
Infinitesimus
Do you care to explain more why you think he can't see clearly? I'm curious
about your reasons for the statement. From my limited outside perspective,
these layoffs are a good idea since there's bound to be a lot of redundancy
and inefficiently in a company of this size

~~~
worldpeace
His writing is shit. Compare his writing to anything from Bezos or Cook.

~~~
orbifold
Most likely he did not write that email himself, that's what assistants are
there for.

~~~
lttlrck
I sincerely hope that is not true.

------
varelse
Because the layoffs at AMD made them the market leader they are today!!!

------
ttty
Liked this part "window.htmlAdWH('348-14-15-135e', "300", "115", 'f',
'adsDiva81062e1ef'); }); }(this,this.jQuery)); } /* */"

------
woi13
1\. Any reason why executive pay can't be reduced and save these jobs ? Why
pay stupid executive million and millions dollars and chop jobs of these poor
people ?

2\. Who determines who gets to stay and who gets to be fired ? Fucked up
ranking system ? Ass-Lickers ?

3\. Anyone saying layoff are good should really take second look outside
during daytime ( 9 - 5). Once you are in battleground of searching job its
hell. Really , its hell. People don't fucking respond even though you have
many blazing things to show. You know why ? Because , you may not necessarily
be good fit ? Your age , Your cool factor , being fucking social comes into
play. If you are in 30s and have given up coding , good luck finding something
in management.

4\. If you are on H1-B , its grand fuck. You get 15 days to leave country or
find new job. Overstaying is illegal and you seriously jeopardize green card ,
stamping process. Many companies ( mine being medium size ) have automated
notification to DHS about H1-B status update, cancelling petition, visas.

edit : Can't believe so many shills here. Let the downvote brigade begin. Have
a good life.

~~~
throwaway0010
If the job is unnecessary why would it be a good idea to "save" it?

~~~
woi13
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.

~~~
mynameisvlad
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.

------
headgasket
Is it me or this guy is trying hard the SteveJobs look in that picture?

Simple solution to all of microsoft's woes: Drop the WINNT kernel and replace
it by a unix based variant. Is there any value in keeping the kernel closed
source ? Hasn't that fight been lost a long time ago?

Windows is going byzantine fast; there's no value in compilers and in os
kernels anymore, the open source ones are better but MS still thinks that they
have these as a competing advantage while they are a R&D money pit.

~~~
72deluxe
What's wrong with the NT kernel? How does its closed-source nature affect how
useful it is? I note that the closed-source iOS kernel seems to also be quite
effective, as does the Mach kernel for Mac OSX (despite the existence of and
generally not very useful OpenDarwin availability). The history of NT is quite
interesting, as is the NT article on Wikipedia.

And despite Mac OSX and iOS being BSD-based, my mum doesn't shout "I love my
UNIX OS!" every time she uses her iPad - she doesn't care.

I don't think Microsoft's woes relate to their kernel. I doubt that you could
argue that Linux's UNIX-style kernel is the single reason for its success in
the server market; userland is what has made it massively useful. And although
varied forms of Linux (read Android) have widespread use, the avalanche of
Linux on the desktop hasn't happened (and likely won't!). Businesses still use
PCs for their work, despite the occasional Mac you see. You don't see people
using mobile devices for work (other than replying to emails whilst on the
move), despite Satya's "mobile-first" new motto.

I would also argue that compilers are not going out of fashion or use and
there is no value in them; do you REALLY believe that? How do you run any
software on your device without a compiler to build the software in the first
place? Given the exciting developments in compiled languages (C++11, C++14)
recently (and half compiled ones like C#) I would argue that they are more
relevant than ever, despite their obvious unpopularity with web developers who
irritatingly eternally proclaim how irrelevant they are, and how out of date
the languages they don't know are.

What makes MS' compilers bad, by the way?

I just thought I'd reply as your comment seemed a little ill-thought-out? It
isn't meant nastily BTW, more of a conversation!

~~~
headgasket
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 transformation of IBM into a services
company, etc. The best compilers out there are open source. The best language
innovations are open source.

I've nothing against C# and VS, which I consider a very good well documented
and better alternative to Java (which is itself loosing ground to javascript
in terms of a glue language), and a wonderful IDE respectively; but I wont pay
for either, as I will not pay or lock myself in MSSQL when postgres is
superior and free. Dont get me wrong, I love MS, I've written code on their
tools since MS VC++ 5. (circa 1995)

Besides that time when they did not stick to the C++ standard with the STL
(was it in VSC++6 or the first .net edition? that one was painful for a while)
I've always respected their compilers -- bug free and fast, and producing fast
code. It's just that there is not value in keeping that closed source anymore,
it's a cost, when the alternatives are all copying each other easily because
the underlying kernels are close cousins.

So in my view MS is basically keeping this huge maintenance burden on it's
own, with a shrinking overall install base percentage based of computing
devices (combination of tablets phones pcs etc)

~~~
72deluxe
No I am not your downvoter! I do not have downvoting powers yet, sadly!
Probably because nobody agrees with me either haha

I can understand some of your arguments. But I would not be too hasty in
believing that everyone wants open source or would agree that open source
kernels are better. I don't dispute it! But, a lot of Windows developers
wouldn't touch Linux with a barge pole, nor would they even know about any of
the BSDs. And there isn't a push in Apple land for open-sourcing the vast
swathes of kernel code or supporting APIs like Cocoa or Carbon from
developers. They just want the APIs to be available, and to work. Not many
people really care about the open source nature of it, I don't think? They do
care about the price, but not the open source nature of it. Besides, most
developers accept that there is a cost to developing and likely factor in the
cost of the IDE and hardware, such as an iPad. The massive success of the iPad
and the App Store would indicate that people accept that they need to pay for
something (although Xcode is free); the fee to be on the app store and to
develop on your own device is real enough.

The massive popularity of C# and the continued sales of Visual Studio (or is
everyone using the Express versions???) would also indicate that not that many
people care about the new features of languages elsewhere, even if they are
really interesting and in open source languages. C# implements enough of their
own interesting features to keep them happy, and surely you'd agree that old
languages have been around long enough and enough code written in them that
has been useful to not mean we should chuck them in the bin? Does that really
old bit of C code looking after that telephone exchange really need to be
rewritten because the language and program is old? Do we definitely need
language innovations? They're interesting and make nerds happy but some would
argue that the old languages don't have that many "problems" that need fixing
with (yet another) language.

I myself have enough of a job trying to keep up with new language features and
innovations and would welcome a slow down in some respects! I want to be able
to write code, not necessarily use latest whizz-bang features. (In fact, I'd
welcome opportunity to use C++11 features but the Windows compiler at work is
VS2010; I have xcode too but obviously can't share code between the two)

I am not sure Microsoft's install base is shrinking as drastically as everyone
likes to make out. Sure, non-Windows smart phones are widespread and iPads are
popular (sometimes even where BYOD is implemented in an organisation) but in
the business world, Exchange + Office still rule, as does Windows Server
(despite us opting to use Linux or BSD where we can).

I really think you're in the minority if you think there will be a sudden
migration to open source platforms using open source tools and new languages.
A lot of developers wouldn't use open source because they consider it
"unfinished". Look at the disdain you'll receive for installing LibreOffice
instead of Office from someone used to Office.

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? How could they make money from their fully open-source
software other than consultancy on it? Apple certainly hasn't done that;
they've made money from building on top of BSD. The BSD licensing means you
don't need to give the code back after you've built on top of it, so even if
it was BSD code Microsoft suddenly used, they'd be in the same "it's ours! you
can't have it" position they are in now, and so would we as external
developers (no access to their code). So why would Microsoft do that? How
would it benefit them or us?

~~~
headgasket
I'm sorry I didn't really mean to frame this as open vs close source; but more
on the bsd vs nt plane.

Compiling/porting C or C++ code on any bsd-derived or unix inspired platform
is a lot easier than crossing over to windows IMHO, because of the WINNT
kernel and the legacy of the prior oses.

I think MS's force is precisely in Office Exchange etc -- business user facing
stuff. The rest is a cost. XBox Zune etc. They should have embraced and
extended(forked) the android kernel, (the boot to gecko firefox os approach)
for these; it would have been a lot less expensive to have a foothold in those
markets.

~~~
72deluxe
I had not thought of the legacy support problems. Their clean break with
Windows Phone 7 doesn't seem to have taken off.

