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Major Job Cuts Expected at Microsoft

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

Phoenix666 writes:

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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:09PM (#206549)

    I wish there was a serious market for generic phones that could run any operating system - you know like PCs are. Well established hardware environment (x86) with industry standard interfaces for add-ons (PCIe, SATA, USB etc) enables PCs to run Windows, Linux, BSD etc. Now suppose there was a platform that had a standard processor family (ARM and/or Atom) with standard bits inside. Then set up a range of OSes - Android, Cyanogenmod, Win10 whatever. You could buy the phone without having to buy phone+OS+bloatware+corporate control of your environment.

    I just got my first smart phone and hate the bloat. Android is also an environment I don't trust too much. Why must every app access everything. Seriously - why does a solitaire game need my location and my contact list? And why does Google listen to everything I say (I know, so does Siri and Cortana etc - hell, even some "smart" TVs can listen to you).

    So who created the PC environment we all know and (sort of) love? - Microsoft. Yes, IBM started the ball rolling, but once they lost control of the market, MS set the hardware standard for the next generations of PCs.

    So why is Microsoft trying to sell hardware+software that is a poor clone of Apple/Android? Why not separate the two - let everyone else make the phones (generic) and concentrate on the OS. They could start by hacking Win10 onto popular phones (like Cyanogenmod does) and then branch out to less common phones while generating interest by the Chinese and Korean phone makers in a generic platform.

    This would make Ubuntu and others available on phones without them going the hardware route.

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