Fark Me To Tears: FTFA: Microsoft Corp. made an indeterminate number of job cuts Wednesday in its marketing and advertising departments.

Considering those are probably the two departments they suck most in, I'm sort of surprised by this.

Otherwise, this is trimming of "fat". It sucks for the guys that are being let go, but I'd imagine that if you were smart enough to get on at Microsoft, there are several small-time agencies that would choke out a puppy to hire you.

Microsoft is fine.

Marine1: Fark Me To Tears: FTFA: Microsoft Corp. made an indeterminate number of job cuts Wednesday in its marketing and advertising departments.

Considering those are probably the two departments they suck most in, I'm sort of surprised by this.

Otherwise, this is trimming of "fat". It sucks for the guys that are being let go, but I'd imagine that if you were smart enough to get on at Microsoft, there are several small-time agencies that would choke out a puppy to hire you.

Microsoft is fine.

I believe they said same thing about Rim two years ago... Microsoft been playing catch up for years.

Franco: Marine1: Fark Me To Tears: FTFA: Microsoft Corp. made an indeterminate number of job cuts Wednesday in its marketing and advertising departments.

Considering those are probably the two departments they suck most in, I'm sort of surprised by this.

Otherwise, this is trimming of "fat". It sucks for the guys that are being let go, but I'd imagine that if you were smart enough to get on at Microsoft, there are several small-time agencies that would choke out a puppy to hire you.

Microsoft is fine.

I believe they said same thing about Rim two years ago... Microsoft been playing catch up for years.

RIM isn't sitting on $40 billion in cash, involved in any growth industries, and hasn't sold 600 million copies of its latest main product.

They still have employees? I thought MS went all 1099 years ago.

I've tracked Microsoft for years: they've long had as many temps in Seattle as they have full-time employees: 35,000 FT employees and 35,000 temps. You'd be shocked by how many programming jobs are done by "temps". And everything else too -- receptionists, QC people, grounds maintenance, etc.

Oh, a company whose stock has been flat for ten years is finally doing some housecleaning? If investors had any control over the system MS would have had annual layoffs starting over five years ago until crap turned around.

Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Oh, a company whose stock has been flat for ten years is finally doing some housecleaning? If investors had any control over the system MS would have had annual layoffs starting over five years ago until crap turned around.

At least they pay a pittance in dividends!

Last summer I was in Denver in July. I was doing something I'd wanted to do for years: take a vacation with almost no advanced planning whatsoever. (I hadn't even decided on Colorado until a few days before my time off of work.) Anyway, once I got there, I discovered that basically every hotel in the city was booked solid, since Microsoft was having its annual sales kickoff convention in town, and had flown in at least 10,000 people, probably more.

In the evening after I went driving through the mountains, I found myself unable to get a hotel anywhere near the city. Instead of going out carousing on 16th street, I almost got in a bar fight at the Chicago Uno grill near the airport, then was reminded of the fact that nothing good happens after the Microsoft reps suggest that everyone at the hotel bar should start taking shots of Jäger.

....anyway, the point is, I am absolutely, utterly unsurprised that Microsoft realized that it was carrying a bit of dead weight in the advertising and marketing divisions.

/Also, give me a few more years and I'll be able to tell pointless, rambling stories that would put Grandpa Simpson to shame.

Microsoft marketing is the worst conceived, badly executed, wholly contrived shiat out there.

It's so formulaic and obvious. From their shiatty packaging (LOL) to their shiatty commercials (Link), they are end to end suck.

What's interesting is that their gag and parody commercials (see links above) are lightyears ahead of their actual product marketing.

Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: If investors had any control over the system MS would have had annual layoffs starting over five years ago until crap turned around.

Thanks for showing why investors should have no say so over how companies are run.

You know the economy Windows 8 is bad when even Microsoft is having layoffs.

Incontinent_dog_and_monkey_rodeo: Oh, a company whose stock has been flat for ten years is finally doing some housecleaning? If investors had any control over the system MS would have had annual layoffs starting over five years ago until crap turned around.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

aQuantive was the advertising company they bought, which bombed horribly. So they pulled the plug. Reading the Jobs book, I was surprised by how often Apple would get rid of large groups of people, as projects came and went.

So are they going to shift their focus to developers, developers, developers, developers, developers?

The article says they're dropping people from advertising and marketing....

I wonder why. They need a major push for Win8. Maybe they've decided "fark it, people will buy it anyways." And then they'll count on the major PC makers to pump in marketing.

/Bought a new Win7 laptop today
//Old HP Dv7 about to die.
///Spent WAAAAY too much because I can.

MaudlinMutantMollusk: they find they no longer need so many developers?

Know how I know you didn't RTFA?

MaudlinMutantMollusk: So having just completed a major development project, they find they no longer need so many developers?

/this is news?

You know how I know you didn't RTFA?

/sorry, I had to
//as for the article itself, looks like MS is cutting some dead weight

MS sacked about 5000 people in non IT positions a couple of years ago. Since then they've hired more than that back as full timers - except the new hires are programmers rather than people involved in non IT positions.

This is more of the same.

Damn, off by 30 seconds.

Marine1: Microsoft is fine.

No they're not. This is a great article, but you can't read the whole thing unless you find a copy of Vanity Fair or use your iPad. This week, I had to use something called a "library" like some kind of damn animal.

But it's a great article.

Fuggin Bizzy: But it's a great article.

Most staggering fact in that article: Microsoft's total revenue for the last fiscal year was $14.7 billion. The iPhone alone in Apple's last fiscal year brought in $22 billion.

The good people will get snapped up by tech companies that are doing well.

Eh, it's the marketing people. Sucks for anyone to lose a job, but if there's a less-talented group of marketing professionals on earth, I'd be shocked to hear of it.

I was hoping it would be an entire layer of middle management, but alas no.

Fuggin Bizzy:: Great article, and one of the reasons I left was this:

"It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers."

My immediate manager took that to heart at the expense of his underlings. While it was the correct way to climb the ladder, it doesn't make your employees want to work for you.

Layoffs are never the economy's fault. It's the company's fault for not preparing for and adjusting their business for changing economic conditions.

Honestly their products lately have been amazing, but I honestly think their marketing is crap...once they fix their marketing they can fix their image and make better sales.

Fuggin Bizzy: Marine1: Microsoft is fine.

No they're not. This is a great article, but you can't read the whole thing unless you find a copy of Vanity Fair or use your iPad. This week, I had to use something called a "library" like some kind of damn animal.

But it's a great article.

Okay, let's review this again: $40 billion in cash. 600 million copies of Windows 7 at a mean price of around $95 a piece. Involved in a number of growth areas (like cloud computing... those Apple services run on Windows Azure).

I mean, other than that... they're in horrible shape.

Microsoft doesn't need layoffs. It needs to be gutted and restructured.

What's stupid here is having ever expanded advertising during a recession. When things really go south, those are first software products to lose value. Advertising doesn't really generate anything concrete. It simply connects dots for a fee, to make money for a middleman. Useful in a thriving economy. However, when dots start going bankrupt, there is less need for connecting them. Microsoft has plenty of talented people; they just need to be more well used.

On the point of their marketing, I actually liked the windows phone 7 ads that everyone thought were dumb. Why? Because unless you're one of those people, you're irritated by phone addicts. The kind of people you can never talk to and are allowing life to pass them by while buried in their phone. So market it as a useful tool, not an addiction like a crackberry or Minecraft.