Microsoft to cut 18,000 jobs
Microsoft CEO tells employees there will be up to 18,000 job cuts within the next year.

Microsoft said it prepared to lay off as many as eighteen thousand workers. This would be the largest layoff in Microsoft's history. This is the company that had twenty billion dollars in sales in the first three months of this year .
Microsoft is apparently trying to be a leaner tech giant. Its CEO Staya Nadella laid out what his vision is going to be in a memo this morning where he announced this cut and he said the first step to building the right organization for our ambitions is to realign our workforce. The overall result of these changes will be more productive, impactful teams across Microsoft.
At the moment the company has a hundred and twenty-seven thousand employees. This amounts to forty percent of its workforce . Here is the thing. They have got twenty-five thousand of those employees after it bought Nokia back in September and the biggest trunk of the cut actually comes from Nokia, amounts to about twelve thousand and five hundred workers. Some of those positions are professionals, the other are factory workers. Now just keep this in mind. It sounds shocking to be eighteen thousand but it's very common for companies to cut jobs when they acquire another company, but the thing is Microsoft specific job cuts are rare. The last time a Microsoft had a major cut, it happened in 2009 during a recession when it laid off more than five thousand employees.
Do you know that some current and former employees do say that Microsoft has actually grown too large and too complex to compete with some nimble companies? Is that a valid criticism?
Well, I mean if you look at what Microsoft has sort of been through, as it changes to mobile, what's happening now is Microsoft has been struggling be relevant as mobile has really become huge. You look at what happened when it introduced its tablet Surface, it was a huge failure. So what Microsoft is trying to do is branch out, be more than a software company
for personal computers, trying to be a stronger competitor to Google and Apple. And the change has been slow for Microsoft, so it' s trimming its workforce to try to make itself stronger . But no doubt about it, Microsoft is still a money maker. It made a healthy seventy billion dollars in profit in the first quarter. So many really look at this as a necessary reorganization , not a necessarily desperate move though by a failing company.