“Microsoft said Thursday that it planned to eliminate up to 18,000 jobs over the next year in a shake-up intended to help the company move more quickly in the market,” Nick Wingfield reports for The New York Times. “The cuts are the largest in the company’s 39-year history, representing about 14 percent of its work force.”
“Microsoft will make the deepest cuts from the businesses it acquired from the Finnish phone maker Nokia. About 12,500 of the jobs being eliminated will come from the Nokia groups,” Wingfield reports. “That is about half the number of employees who joined Microsoft from Nokia a few months ago when it completed its acquisition of the company’s mobile business. In related news, Microsoft said it would no longer make Nokia phones based on the Android operating system, switching its low-end phones to Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.”
“Microsoft said it would take a charge of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion to cover severance and related costs from the layoffs over the next year,” Wingfield reports. “Previously, the largest layoffs at the company were in 2009, when about 5,800 people were affected.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Karmic.
Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we’ve embarked on that change… We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable. – Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. – Steve Jobs, June 12, 2005
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “chinstrap” for the heads up.]
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