Cringely suggests job losses at Microsoft should be ten times greater | Hacker News Reader

Cringely suggests job losses at Microsoft should be ten times greater

cringely.com

14 pointsnaish12 comments

I am failing to see a point in this post. Would it have killed him to write:

Microsoft should lay off 50,000 employees because...[his point].

The closest he comes is this:

Instead of 5000 positions, the company should drop 50,000. It should decide what businesses it is in and close or sell the rest. It should be a lot better than it is at running its true core – the muscle that’s been hiding beneath all that fat.

But that omits a why.

I'm not sure you read the whole article; it's mostly about how Microsoft is overstaffed, and that if you conservatively assume a 10 year average tenure for FTEs at Microsoft, they're losing a multiple of their layoff size every year just in turnover.

Probably not in this economy though.

I did read the whole article. The point you just made was the same as his, laying off 5,000 is meaningless.

I agree, but that is not the same as a reason why Microsoft should lay off 50,000 which was my complaint.

He's saying they should lay off 50,000 people because that would still leave them with one of the largest staffs of any company in the industry, but would shed the large amount of dead wood he repeatedly alleges remains inside of Microsoft.

That answers the question of "How can Microsoft get by with so many more layoffs" but not the question of why it would be a good idea. Specifically, the author identifies Microsoft's real long-term problem as the growing irrelevance of the PC and MS' inability to control the various markets that are supplanting it. How getting rid of half of the employees in the company would fix that problem; I'm not sure.

One inference I made easily from the article: if most of what Microsoft is doing is increasingly irrelevant, then they may be heavily staffing projects that are not strategically valuable.

Don't have a lot of time for Cringely any more.

However there is a strong argument for breaking Microsoft up in to smaller units - gaming, office, OS and hardware.

If broken up I think the individual units would have a lot more drive, focus and identity.

It must be quite depressing being a creative developer in a company that does so much you can never feel you'll make a difference.

It's funny how consistently, for such a long time, year after year I see this as-a-matter-of-facty drops of "... when desktop disappears ..." into sentences. Seems like everybody else but me surely knows that it will, and understands why. I can hear Eric Cartman whispering into my year "You're so stuuuuupeeed."

Just wait until google gets serious about its OS efforts then desktop development will become the "next big thing" again.

For several people, it already has. What you use certainly doesn't matter as much as it used to, as long as it has a browser.

Cringely is a stooge for The Man.

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