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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.
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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?
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:24PM
The difference is that Shoes are simple enough that a ton of people could make a quality shoe and the two shoe companies in the world would soon cease to exist. The problem is that the cost to enter into the Phone / Internet Business is pretty steep, if you want to be a major competitor.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @01:22AM
seems fair enough in theory, and i think you're right that a ton of people could make a quality shoe prototype, but when it ccomes to mass production the quality of the prototype is meaningless. quality in mass production is about repeatedly achieving the same output regardless of the perceived quality of the actual output. if you can repeatedly reproduce identical pairs of shitty plain white nondescript sneakers and sell them cheap, with a bit of nouse you can succeed in selling a quality product.
if you have poor mass production quality, you might market a totally awesome space shoe that also gives headjobs, but if every second she falls apart in a matter of days, you're gunna go out of business.
in this respect, shoes aren't as different as you might think to phones. when we buy shoes or phones or any number of widgets, we expect that they will perform as advertised. if they don't we demand our money back, so the difficulty for someone who manufactures shoes and phones is less about making something awesome and more about how to satisfy projected demand without fucking up your reputation for manufacturing quality.
there, ftfy
if you had also appended this to the line about shoes it would have made the shoe prospect as challenging as what you were trying to paint for phones
this has less to do with the actual product/service and more to do with marketing, lobbying, legalities and other nefarious activities, and is also why many big companies will expand by spending significant amounts of money for acquisition of a company that already has a product with established market share, because establishing yourself in a new market from scratch is a huge gamble. most businesses fail due to infant mortality.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday July 09 2015, @03:36AM
A significant difference regarding barrier to entry: shoes don't need a nation wide communication network to function. If you make ten pairs of shoes, you can sell ten pairs of shoes. But who will by a phone that only has service in one small town?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by yarp on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:09AM
Pfft! You just wait until the iShoe is announced.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday July 10 2015, @01:21AM
Narp?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek