Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has been all over the news after it had announced fresh rounds of employee cut-backs last year in July (2014), one of the biggest in the history of Microsoft, with a motive of restructuring across all levels in their organization to prepare their force for the next round of industry know-how and customer demands.
The officially planned count was 18000 layoffs that were carried out in different intervals of time through multiple sessions being July, September and October, the last year (2014). Final round of layoff happened on 4th April -2015, supposedly being the last round of the job cuts.
The impulse behind these job cuts were explained to be cumulating the various divisions and its associated roles and responsibilities by carting off the prolixity in the job roles, departments, functions and operations.
The cutoffs commenced with the acquired Nokia handset division and went across its Operating systems group, Research Group, Xbox, MSN and other numerous engineering and marketing divisions. But the major cut back i.e. 12500 out of the planned count were from their Nokia handset acquired division. And the last round of job cuts comprised majorly of their IT division.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) claims that these job cuts and staff reductions would allow them to align the functions of the entire conglomerate including all their acquisitions and strategic business units with the mainline of Microsoft’s operation and rejig the organization for the latest and upgraded skill sets and industry trends. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is confident about this, because the layoffs are planned in such a way that the subsequent job cuts would remove people with similar duties and responsibilities and increase the obligation of the retained force horizontally and vertically to retain the best talent and make them equipped to handle the current and projected industry aptitude and the competition.
Overall, it can be stated, that extensive layoffs were planned mainly for their IT divisions, but had significant impacts on other departments as well, but whether these steps would result into the projected outcomes is awaited.
