http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stori...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2009-01-22-09-21-37 OK, now we ARE in trouble... if one of the most wealthy, prosperous companies starts laying off people, it is time to start worrying. Isn't it?
Only if you are in said Wealthy company. I think that the time to worry was when the Market was skyrocketing yet housing was going down. That indicator to me was a sign that something big is about to happen. my Economics teacher taught us that one of the most reliable forecasting tools for the economy coming up is the housing market. If that is going down and stocks are going up then it means that there is trouble ahead.
I would just built a shack in the woods, load up on food and supplies, but you can't even do that without a permit and paying taxes
No not really... You see Microsoft need to do this so that they don't go lower or much lower at the next Quater (well anyway hope they will not), because they need to please the investors. A bit like how Vista was released in a rush, investors pressure. In the troubled economy of today, investors will pull out quickly if they feel things are not under controlled. Now I am no professional, this is just my guess.
If you pick a remote enough spot, who is going to check? In any case, unless you plan to set your own broken bones and perform your own appendectomy, you may want the pay some taxes.
They should be laying off the people on H-1B visas so they can head on home. There was no shortage of qualified engineers to fill their positions last year when Gates testified before Congress that the H-1B visa cap needed to be raised. There was only a shortage of individuals willing to work for the substandard wages MS wanted to pay. Not that Microsoft was the lone business doing so.
I bit narrow minded, isn't it. They don't work for a sub-standard wage, they work for an above average wage where they are from. It's just that the Americans priced themselves out of a global market. To be fair, they shouldn't be heading home; we should be adjusting our expectations to fit a new global reality.
Microsoft's a company with its fingers in many, many pies. Even as someone who follows the company quite closely, trying to keep track of all the products/services they offer makes you realise how staggering the scale is. Thing is, they tend to do a lot of R&D (ironic for a company that people claim never innovates itself) and I suspect a lot of the cutbacks will be in a lot of those areas where they aren't guaranteed to make a profit, at least for a while. I guess even though they're still making enough money, the company needs to streamline itself in case things get really rough.
Microsoft who has billions in profits, one of the most wealthy companies in the world, needs to trim 5,000? Oh they might be .001 billion off this year? Boohoo. I swear, every company these days is using the economic downturn as an excuse to cut back and fill their own pockets with even more money. Their investors are billionaires, what could they possibly need with the small increase in profits they will get from the cuts?
I think Microsoft's been working on that for a while - it's called "Windows 7". More likely than not, Microsoft (like so many other companies right now) have plenty of money banked, but are using the economy as an excuse to get rid of workers that they've wanted gone for some time but had no other legitimate reason to fire them. Not that I have anything to back that up, but Windows licenses being sold with 90% of machines being sold allows MS to have a pretty reliable revenue stream pretty much indefinitely. Having said that, getting rid of good (read: expensive) engineers just to replace them in a couple years when things are picking back up again is hardly a cost-effective move - they'll have to re-recruit, retrain, build effective teams, etc. all over again. And that causes their products to suffer, which is good for Apple and Linux but bad for the rest of the world.
That's why I think that this is not just a clean-up exercise. Even Google has been cutting back on services. I think we don't half know just how bad things really are...
The news just keeps pouring in. Even Sony who is posting it''s first loss in 14 years (14 yrs of profit and one fiscal loss is enough to bring them to their knees? Give me a break) is cutting workers. Makes me glad I don't work in the private sector anymore.
Truth be told, my first thought was "lol, owned"*. It's hard to reach into your soul and pull out pity for Microsoft employees. But, I remind myself, they have families and futures too. Maybe. What gets me is, Microsoft aren't a company that need a small army of employees. They don't have a huge public interface like shop outlets and chains do. All the people they employ are techies - people doing genuinely valuable jobs (as opposed to answering phones or swiping products at a counter, no disrespect to those jobs intended). So it's not like when you see "HMV fire 300,000"; it's 5000 programmers and development jockies who got fired. That's not something you do on the side to save a bit of money to meet margins - that seems indicative of massive financial problems. Which surprises me, because MS are an economic Leviathan, and they just released Vista a year ago, and the 360 is meant to be turning profits by now. They seem(ed) to be generally doing well. *My second thought was "WHAT 5000"
