The slashing of Nokia by the software giant has produced the largest layoffs wave in tech history.
One of the largest mass layoffs that the tech industry has ever seen is now making mobile technology news as the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has revealed that the company is working to reshape and redesign itself and, in doing so, up to 18,000 jobs will be eliminated.
This tremendous hacking of the company’s workforce represents 14 percent of the total.
The goal, said the chief executive officer, is to recreate the company into something that is sleeker and more up to date within the PC industry so that it will be able to better compete with rivals such as Google and Apple. At the same time, this mobile technology news will more than likely turn the company’s culture on its head, as it has traditionally focused on protecting the existing franchises at its center, Windows and Office.
The cutbacks making this mobile technology news will be spread out over the next twelve months.
The majority of the layoffs will occur as Microsoft nearly halves the size of Nokia, the cell phone hardware business that it has only just recently acquired. The goal is to give the business more room to become a much more mobile friendly software and cloud computing business.
While some cuts had been expected, this recently announced number is notably larger than what had been anticipated. They also represent the most layoffs that the software giant has ever made at any point in its thirty nine year lifetime, to date. Their announcement has arrived only five months into Nadella’s role as CEO.
Aside from the shrinking of Nokia, Nadella didn’t provide very many details about where else the company will be seeing reductions. Areas to receive greater amounts of funding were also not identified as a part of this mobile technology news. Many speculations have suggested that the Xbox Entertainment Studios unit might find itself under the axe, as its efforts to generate original content begin petering out. Equally, it is likely that the focus on its highest profile video game project, “Halo”, particularly in light of its film version.
