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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 08 2015, @04:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-the-mighty-have-fallen dept.

Microsoft plans to announce a major new round of layoffs as early as Wednesday, as the company seeks to further cut costs in a shifting technology landscape.

The layoffs are in addition to the about 18,000 employees that Microsoft said it planned to let go a year ago, according to people briefed on the plans, who asked for anonymity because the details were confidential. The new job cuts are expected to affect people in Microsoft's hardware group, among other parts of the company, including the struggling smartphone business that it acquired from Nokia last year in a $7.2 billion deal.
...
In June, Microsoft said it was selling its online display advertising business to AOL, as the company exited a business for which it once had high hopes.

Another area in which Microsoft is stumbling is smartphones, a market in which it has continued to lose market share since acquiring Nokia's handset business. Microsoft has so far failed to turn the Windows Phone operating system, which runs on its handsets, into a vibrant alternative to the two leading mobile platforms, iOS from Apple and Android from Google.

How do you read the tea leaves, Soylent? What does the future hold for Microsoft?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:09PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:09PM (#206517) Journal

    How do you read the tea leaves, Soylent? What does the future hold for Microsoft?

    Continued OEM tax dominance in the shrinking, but not dying, categories of laptops and PCs, despite the growth of Chromebooks and Mac OS X.

    A desperate attempt to monetize cloud storage for universal Office apps on smartphones and tablets.

    Microsoft [wikipedia.org]'s revenues were $86.83 billion in 2014. Its income was $22 billion in 2014. Compare that to the not-yet-split Hewlett-Packard [wikipedia.org], which has triple the employees.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:33PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday July 08 2015, @08:33PM (#206600)

    I've noticed a big uptake on a few fronts for Dot Net, ScarePoint, Azure, etc. This is not due to it being good technology, but from what I can gather, *lots* of marketing weasels talking up the usual purchasers and executives (aka, the Oracle technique). It's too bas too, as we're at the point that decoupling from Microsoft has never been easier, but tying into some of these products has never been more damaging.

    Microsoft is putting on a nice public face 'open sourcing' a few things, but still seems to be trying back room tactics to damage other platforms.

    Well, at least they seem to be getting *smarter* if not actually better. Maybe the better will happen.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @10:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @10:05PM (#206627)

      marketing weasels

      I like your choice of words.

      decoupling from Microsoft has never been easier

      Amen.

      Microsoft [...] 'open sourcing'

      M$ has been on a big openwashing googlebombing campaign [google.com] to try to glom onto the buzz that openness is getting and to distort the understanding of the term.

      Of course, what MSFT does is -not- open.
      Jim Whitehurst's point #3 applies. [theregister.co.uk]

      "covered code" [google.com]
      PATENTS.TXT [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [github.com]

      Anybody who still believes M$'s stuff is "open", try this:
      Download some of M$'s "open" code.
      Modify it.
      Upload the modified source to an accessible-by-anyone server.
      Go to a bunch of M$-owned forums and post a link to your modified M$ code.
      (Make it very clear how to contact you.)

      After M$'s proxies show up at your door with armed federal marshals and they seize all your computers and media, find a public terminal and tell us all about that.

      .
      LibreOffice 5.0 is due in August.
      It will be interesting to see the reaction from those who try it.
      Too bad Lamestream Media won't mention it at all.

      -- gewg_

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 08 2015, @11:35PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 08 2015, @11:35PM (#206660) Journal

        I'm putting this here since I was curious about it: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0 [documentfoundation.org]

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      • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:09PM

        by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:09PM (#207130)

        LibreOffice 5.0 is due in August.
        It will be interesting to see the reaction from those who try it.

        Presumably the reaction of those who don't even try it, or their reasons for not trying it, is not interesting ?

        My guess is that many of those who have not switched have tried and found things missing, and will check the release notes to see what is in there and if it is worth trying again. Things like the #1 voted #1 commented OO bug that is over 13yrs old... The OO guys in fact seem to have given up, advising users to https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959#c299 [apache.org]"find a product where the feature is available. Here it is at best available someday in an indefinite and very speculative future." (and that is after saying in 2007 that https://bz.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3959#c54 [apache.org]"the whole Writer team agrees with you that the Outline View is one of the most important missing features in Writer"). Thanks, we have already found other products that have the feature, what we want is to be able to replace them with open source.

        So, maybe LO is better at taking bold steps with the code to deliver serious features ? Well, the 5.0 draft release notes are available, and the #1 new major feature (this is a major release right ?) is... emoji support. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur, but I would have thought that would be way way way down the list of word processor features needed to get more users to switch.