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The meaning of Microsoft CEO's memo has been translated into action: Microsoft will cut 18,000 jobs, mostly from the Nokia division (12,500 jobs).
Later today your Senior Leadership Team member will share more on what to expect in your organization. Our workforce reductions are mainly driven by two outcomes: work simplification as well as Nokia Devices and Services integration synergies and strategic alignment.
First, we will simplify the way we work to drive greater accountability, become more agile and move faster. As part of modernizing our engineering processes the expectations we have from each of our disciplines will change. In addition, we plan to have fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making. This includes flattening organizations and increasing the span of control of people managers. In addition, our business processes and support models will be more lean and efficient with greater trust between teams. The overall result of these changes will be more productive, impactful teams across Microsoft. These changes will affect both the Microsoft workforce and our vendor staff. Each organization is starting at different points and moving at different paces.
Second, we are working to integrate the Nokia Devices and Services teams into Microsoft. We will realize the synergies to which we committed when we announced the acquisition last September. The first-party phone portfolio will align to Microsoft's strategic direction. To win in the higher price tiers, we will focus on breakthrough innovation that expresses and enlivens Microsoft's digital work and digital life experiences. In addition, we plan to shift select Nokia X product designs to become Lumia products running Windows. This builds on our success in the affordable smartphone space and aligns with our focus on Windows Universal Apps.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by turgid on Thursday July 17 2014, @07:48PM
These 1% managers don't realize that the 99% of us don't appreciate them and what they do. I'm not advocating a revolution, but at some point there won't be any jobs left and the companies that could hire people will be destroyed. We can't all sell extended warranties to each other. Eventually something has to give.
I'm hoping that these lumbering dinosaurs die a death over the next 5 to 10 years under their own stupidity as they ignore reality and smaller businesses spring up to take their place.
Sooner or later there will come a tipping point where the only people who will want to work for those old companies are those who are desperate or ignorant/stupid, and the only people still there are the dead wood or those lacking in motivation who didn't leave during any of the downsizing cycles.
A few years back I got TUPEd from Xerox to HCL (along with 600 other Xeroids) and it was like a parallel universe. These poor, young, inexperienced Indians really revered the big Western brands like HP, IBM, Microsoft, GE, etc. and saw it as some sort of prize or a great honour to be allowed to work for one. They couldn't understand why I personally wouldn't aspire to working for Microsoft or HP.
They don't even realise that they are being contracted to these companies because they are so much cheaper than us. They have been brainwashed by their employers that they are somehow more intelligent and industrious than us and have these magical new ways of working that are far superior to anything the West has.
What they end up doing is living away from their families for months at a time on subsistence wages, working under impossible pressures of work load and deadlines, every waking hour and weekends on tasks that really require large teams of experienced engineers (10+ years).
Obviously, the projects fail or are so late (years) that they are of no use.
But they are cheap.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].