Microsoft Laying 18,000 Employees Off.
Source: Microsoft
Earlier today Microsoft announced its biggest move yet so far, it is slashing over 18,000 jobs in the company. Purpose? Simple; to make the company leaner and easier to manage, making it more flexible and more adaptive to certain market changes. The move though is one of its biggest in the history and since acquiring Nokia. It was in mentions though that most of the job cuts will be affecting the ‘used to be’ Finnish phone maker. With that move also Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft will be ending Nokia’s Android project; the Nokia X phones.
The move may not come as a surprise as it could have been Nadella’s plan long ago to make the company leaner and more flexible to the volatile technology industry. Example? Nokia used to be the forerunner in mobile phone technologies and a leading brand in its own industry, forward 5 years and they have lost most of their market share to the likes of Apple, Samsung, and HTC. Nadella plans to keep only a small amount of key employees for the company to move forward which means that this move may not be such a bad move after all. The most affected branch of this job slash, Nokia could benefit and use some trimming as well for it move forward. The job slashing would refocus Nokia to develop phones under the control and watch of Microsoft, while allowing Microsoft to have greater control over the hardware. This could just mean that we would see better Microsoft Windows Phone devices in the future with Nokia as well. It is a good thing.
While this is a good long term move though it could cost Microsoft a little bit for now. The move of cutting down so many jobs would mean that plenty of employees will lose their source of income. Not only that the employees will lose some friends in the process. With those comes insecurity of the employees staying in the company, which really affects the moral of the company. So with the job cuts Microsoft may see a slow down in productivity for a little while. So job cutting, a bad thing? Not really. A good thing? Could be.
