Microsoft lays off 2,100, axes Silicon Valley research

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/18/microsoft-redundancies-idINL1N0RJ25920140918

by Garbage • 12 years ago

96 32 12 years ago

in.reuters.com

nostromo• 12 years ago

The logic of spreading out layoffs over the corse of an entire year escapes me. Particularly when it's the first year of a new CEO. What are they thinking?

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

I have to wonder if they're not trying to speed up the rate of voluntary exits.

jedanbik2• 12 years ago

Definitely. If you quit, you don't get unemployment insurance benefits.

Microsoft is trading morale for money.

funkyy• 12 years ago

I have been to one of the campuses few times (working as a contractor with newly transfered employees) - they said themselves - Microsoft was like communist country:

-extraordinary social

-very low performance targets

-completely guaranteed work

-overspending on servicing employees (renting them cars, providing accommodations, even giving out quick loans to those that needed)

This was hurting the market, finally seems to be over.

I wonder how much of the workforce was employed in Nokia directly though.

jmspring• 12 years ago

Curious. I've not heard of this.

Skype/Yammer kept some of their pre-acquisition perks -- food, snacks, services (that you have to pay for) on-site. This? Nope.

xnull• 12 years ago

It's weird. We have this notion in America that corporations are (or are supposed to be) efficient. They're not. Markets are if you grant a series of tenuous assumptions. Markets are the fair efficient competition between unfair and inefficient firms.

enraged_camel2• 12 years ago

Yeah, if anything, corporations are islands of communism where resources are distributed by central planners (i.e. executive management). And it has been proven over and over that central planning is a horribly inefficient way to distribute resources.

acomjean• 12 years ago

When I was at IBM research last century, we thought MS research was doing awesome things, but unable to get products out. There appeared to be some fear that MS would start producing stuff from their research. (MS and IBM were competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena)

I hope the New England R&D (NERD) which has been very generous with allowing software groups to use their space to meet continues to do so.

Short sited and a sad day.

swartkrans• 12 years ago

When I read about the immense amount of money that has reportedly gone into research at companies like Microsoft, billions of dollars, and seen very little ever come of it, I can't help but think maybe they would have been better of just making it a venture capital fund. I don't think R&D departments have the incentive entrepreneurs have in actually making research useful. Google X stands out as different, and I think that's because Google seems to be using it for marketing as much as research. We've yet to see any game changers come out of there, unless you think Google Glass was a success. The self-driving automobiles are interesting and will probably lead to something, and the air drones too. It's probably not all a wash.

reboog711• 12 years ago

The conspiracy theory I heard is that MS is playing a long game to go private.

Whenever their stock starts to go up; they pump a lot into R&D which makes them less attractive to investors stabilizing or lowering their stock price while not devaluing the company.

I don't know enough about stock manipulating to evaluate these statements, but I found them interesting when first told to me.

tiffanyh• 12 years ago

The dollar figures for "R&D" are really deceiving. Don't forget the "D" stand for development.

For a company the size of Microsoft, who has 130k employees, it's not unrealistic to imagine 40k employees are developers and/or product management.

At an average fully loaded cost of $150k per developer x 40k developers = $6 Billion.

So all the cost to just maintain their EXISTING product set, in this illustration, might be $6B ... none of which is "research"

da02• 12 years ago

Where were some things @ MS research (back then) that stood out as awesome or memorable to you?

peterb• 12 years ago

They only axed Silicon Valley research. Microsoft Research is still strong, but in Redmond, Israel and other locations. The Microsoft executive team fully recognizes that research is key to their future success.

judk3• 12 years ago

What success has come from MSR? MSR always seemed like a charity operation.

philwelch• 12 years ago

(MS and IBM were competing in the Notes vs Outlook arena)

If IBM was worried about Microsoft Outlook competing with Lotus Notes, whatever Microsoft Research was working on was surely not even worth worrying about compared to the fact that IBM's product was Lotus Notes.

mikeryan• 12 years ago

(this thread is a dupe) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336954

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

That thread is also a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8336033, but it really doesn't matter in the end.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Being optimistic, this will presumably generate loads of new companies.

bkjelden• 12 years ago

It seems that satellite campuses are particularly hard hit with this round. I wonder if there is a desire at the top to move more things back to redmond.

chetanahuja• 12 years ago

It's a real shock in this day and age of intense competition for talent to let go of such a large number of talented (they must be, to be there in the first place) engineers (or is it scientists) in the heart of silicon valley. To me that's a sign of a company that doesn't see a way to grow new products via creative efforts of it's employees. Oh well, I guess it's good news for the startups who could much better use the that same talent. (Edit - to remove what might have sounded like a recruiting pitch)

bunkydoo• 12 years ago

How else do you think they got the cash to buy Minecraft?

Microsoft lays off 2,100, axes Silicon Valley research

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