Microsoft preparing for new layoffs?

A new report from Fudzilla claims that Microsoft is getting ready to lay off 15,000 employees, or about 17% of its worldwide staff. The axe will apparently fall on January 15th, exactly one week before its second quarter earnings report, and they expect MSN division to be hit hardest, while the successful Xbox crew will probably make it out relatively unscathed. Meanwhile, an anonymous blogger who goes by the name Mini-Microsoft and claims to be an employee well-versed in the goings-on inside the company has been fielding questions from other purported Microsoft workers on recent cutback concerns. This past Monday he posted a handful of anonymous comments saying that the rumored layoffs aren't happening -- at least not in January -- although a re-organization might be in the cards. Both reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but one thing's for certain -- Windows 7 is gonna rule.

[Via Joystiq]

Read - Fudzilla report
Read - Mini-Microsoft

[conor @ Dec 31st 2008 9:08PM]

Finally, they need to trim down and reevaluate.

[AVG @ Dec 31st 2008 9:19PM]

Agreed. They are putting out their best OS (arguably) ever, cutting the fat, and going to storm into 2009 a whole new company.

[BobFromVegas @ Dec 31st 2008 9:44PM]

Yep. Fat ol' Microsoft's cholesterol levels are just too high. Back to vegetables, fruits, and a healthy serving of carbs and meats :)

Can't wait for windows 7.

[GoVegan @ Dec 31st 2008 10:52PM]

@BobFromVegas who wrote "Fat ol' Microsoft's cholesterol levels are just too high. Back to vegetables, fruits, and a healthy serving of carbs and meats".

Meat isn't healthy, not unless you are a lion or a tiger!
BTW my cholesterol level is about 130, and you won't find any cases of heart disease with anyone under 150, that means I'll probably outlive Microsoft :)

[BobFromVegas @ Dec 31st 2008 11:12PM]

Oh and don't forget the cake. Microsoft needs cake-what else would they use a Macbook Air for then?

[conor @ Dec 31st 2008 11:29PM]

Go back to your pot smoking hippie friends you wimpy vegetarian, you need more protein. Meat is an essential food group. I eat meat every day and I am extremely healthy. I feel bad for you, no bacon.

[siva @ Jan 1st 2009 12:43AM]

All legumes and various whole grains contain plenty of protein for humans. Martina Navratilova is a vegetarian and she played competitive tennis for longer than any other player! And you cannot say she is not healthy!

Over the course of our evolution, human digestive tract has become more suited for a mostly vegetarian diet. The length of our intestine is a dead giveaway. All carnivores have intestines that are less than 10 feet long. Ours is greater than 20 feet long.

[BobFromVegas @ Jan 1st 2009 1:14AM]

That's because we aren't carnivores, we're omnivores.

And in any case, let's keep diverse. If our economy fails completely and we lose the huge corporations mass producing our food we're effed.

[Agent .25i @ Jan 1st 2009 2:09AM]

Vegans, Carnivores... whatever. I say to hell with the lot of you. I'M a VAGITARIAN!!!!!

P.S. Your body need meat, plain and fucking simple.

Plus alligator skin shoes look fucking sweet sticking out the bottom of my calf skin pants. Smooth as butter on my bare ass.
Hope you enjoy your wheat grass and hemp clothing, douche's.

[Boards of Canada @ Jan 1st 2009 4:36AM]

Wouhouuuu! Meat/vegetables flame war!!!

I so wanna eat a good couscous though...

and what about fishes... Okinawa people have the longest life. We should mesure their intestine! Me im in the dark side of japan... Osaka, where yakitori and yakiniku are the least of our sins...

[Mark Anderson @ Jan 1st 2009 7:47AM]

Humans are omnivorous. That means we can absorb nutrients from both vegetable and plant sources and, although the bulk of our diet should really be vegetable based, to suggest that we're better off exclusively choosing one over the other is just silly since the purpose of food is actually to keep you alive.

So , vegans, consider this: If you're in the middle of a desert, two weeks from civilization and with nothing but a fortnight's supply of beef jerky to keep you going then you're going to lose that argument pretty bloody quickly.

[Inane_Asylum @ Jan 1st 2009 2:20PM]

I'm a meatatarian. It's a personal choice. You have to commit to it.

[Precurse @ Jan 2nd 2009 10:29AM]

To all you vegan flamers out there...

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3282/2852662944_29e5398a30.jpg?v=0

Oh and yes, variety is good. I'm not saying eating a steak a day is good for you (there are leaner meats out there), but others like chicken, turkey, fish, etc are still good alternatives and each offer different nutrients than the other. It's true that eating meat alone and forgetting veggies altogether is NOT good for you, but a mix in between is quite good. Lots of vegans/vegetarians jump on the bandwagon because the only see the "animal killing", not knowing the impacts on their own health (everyone has to be selfish to some degree). Lots simply don't realize the nutrients they miss out on (like vitamin B-12) and are actually doing more harm than good. Anyways, lets get back to the original topic ..

[gonintendo @ Dec 31st 2008 9:11PM]

I have fallen in love ...... with an operating system. The windows se7en beta is, to sum it up, amazing. so much better than vista, eons ahead of xp, and osx doesn't even compare.

[Boards of Canada @ Dec 31st 2008 9:32PM]

heu really? shit I dont know because you may be just trolling around but you make me want to see that for myself!!

[gonintendo @ Dec 31st 2008 10:06PM]

that's the glasser extension for firefox along with stylish for the bookmarks bar, although i reverted back to the normal bar.

[Jae @ Dec 31st 2008 10:21PM]

I'm with you here. I'm using it (Beta 1) right now on a 3 yr old celeron laptop with all the bells and whistles running and it runs just as well as if it was XP. Check out Orbit30's patches that get rid of that ugly "send feedback" link on all the windows along with the desktop watermark. Can't wait for the RTM so I can start using it full time and get rid of my XP partition. Keep up the good work MS!

[gonintendo @ Dec 31st 2008 10:32PM]

Yeah, it really flies on my athlon 64 x2 500+ and a 4850. How much ram do you have? I have an oldish desktop with a 2.9 ghz celery and 512 mb ram (plus a cruddy pci geforce 6200)

[uclatommy @ Jan 1st 2009 12:48AM]

I thought you guys were serious at first. But then I saw the screenshots and realized you were joking. Hehe.. good one.. thanks for the chuckle.

[Boards of Canada @ Jan 1st 2009 1:07AM]

look nice indeed! hope it'll be out in 2009!

[gonintendo @ Jan 1st 2009 1:36AM]

Same here, Happy New Year!

[Blastar @ Jan 1st 2009 5:51AM]

Actually it has MANY things from OSX. For example the "stay in doc thing".
IF you ever used OSX you ll find many similarities with Windows 7 even in Vista and they were all first appeared at OSX for some reason.
Apple spying on Microsoft or Microsoft copying Apple ?
I think the answer is very obvious to the most of the people.

[adrian @ Jan 1st 2009 8:41AM]

Wait for it's release and see it in operation with everyday PC users first before making the "it's amazing" comments. I am sure people said that about Vista.

Still it does look a lot better though.

Microsoft should give this OS away as compensation.

[Mark Anderson @ Jan 1st 2009 9:45AM]

@adrian,

Why should MS give W7 away since, you know, Vista isn't actually broken, works fine and actually caused fewer issues than XP?

Seriously. I'm interested in your answer. If you have one.

[Inane_Asylum @ Jan 1st 2009 2:27PM]

@Mark Anderson

...Wow, Vista is *far* from "not broken." Just because it works on your machine doesn't mean it works across the board. I had it running for all of two weeks, maybe, before it broke on me. After trying to do *anything*, it would pop up with "Windows Explorer has stopped working and needs to restart," then would proceed to reload the desktop (not reboot), and close all windows. Didn't matter whether I was even trying to use Windows Explorer. After a miserable time trying to troubleshoot it, I fell for Ubuntu's siren call...

[Rick @ Jan 5th 2009 12:01PM]

You're comparing a beta future OS to an OS that's been out for a year? Ha. Let's see what the final 7 looks like and then compare it to Snow Leopard before you go around spewing windows fan boy crap everywhere.

[Zinger314 @ Dec 31st 2008 9:13PM]

I find it ironic that this article is directly above the "Microsoft Confirms Zunes Borked" article.

[Dew @ Dec 31st 2008 9:15PM]

I hope they don't axe any people from the Zune team.

[Tiffany @ Dec 31st 2008 9:26PM]

fudzilla? never heard of them. sounds to me like they are just running with the minimsft rumors.

[digitallysick @ Dec 31st 2008 9:30PM]

Zune team gets the axe ouch

[Game_playa @ Dec 31st 2008 9:30PM]

I hope the layoffs are from the DirectXbox department.

[Craig @ Dec 31st 2008 9:31PM]

Well, they could do with more people to QA the Zune date-handling code. Perhaps they can fire the people responsible for the latest, seinfeld-heavy advertising campaign and save both money, and embarrassment?

[B3astofthe3ast @ Dec 31st 2008 9:32PM]

What does MSN do again?

[BigD145 @ Jan 1st 2009 3:26AM]

Waste money.

[Joey Bobby @ Dec 31st 2008 9:33PM]

MSN is the #1 reason why Microsoft is failing. A bunch of overpaid useless/redundant bunch of people who do nothing more than having futile meetings 6 times a week talking about the dumbest things that won't help Microsoft one bit - and not to mention having coffee breaks almost every other 2 hours.

Axe that department and focus on building what Microsoft is famous for - SOFTWARE. And I'm very sure it has to do much with the redundant staffing since the purchase of the overpriced Aquantive in Seattle. Before you go and rebutt, think about what MSN does all day ? After years of competition and billion dollar buyout of other ad agencies, MSN still can't dent google even the smallest bit. So you meet all week and talk about strategies but nothing ever comes out of this MSN group. Like I said, a bunch of over paid futile employees who should of been axed a LONG TIME ago.

Focus on what MS does best - SOFTWARE. Fix this up before you lose more market share to APPLE in the OS dept. Bring on Windows 7.

[Rob Conway @ Dec 31st 2008 9:46PM]

hey hey hey, i know A guy who uses MSN!

[gonintendo @ Dec 31st 2008 10:23PM]

I had msn dialup back in the day and it was god awful. only worked for half the week.

[superhobo @ Jan 1st 2009 5:58AM]

Agreed.
MSN is pretty useless, Live is okay though, especially the new services.

[Johan S @ Jan 1st 2009 6:13AM]

MSN Live Messenger .. uh I guess they call it Windows Live Messenger now .. is awesome. Once u get used and start using all its features it's great.

[Alexei @ Dec 31st 2008 9:34PM]

My grandma told me to take Fudzilla with a grain of salt.

[Brian @ Dec 31st 2008 9:35PM]

Windows 7 = God. Its unarguably their best OS ever. Significantly faster than XP and tremendously faster than vista.

[Blastar @ Jan 1st 2009 6:40AM]

I think you gone a bit far..
Windows Seven is not God.. nor God is Windows Seven.

[neodorian @ Jan 1st 2009 5:36PM]

Well, man is 5 and the devil is 6 and god is 7 so you may be onto something here.

Honestly I've been running it on my laptop and it's great. Then again, Vista flew on this laptop so I would need to compare on something older to see how well they trimmed the desktop window manager and graphical stack to help it run on lower spec machines. So far the only things that don't work are some hotkeys on my laptop that I can't use because the Lenovo software won't install if it doesn't detect you using XP or Vista. Otherwise everything is rock solid.

[Benson @ Jan 1st 2009 9:24PM]

How far is a man from God?

About a third of a devil, I guess...

[BlackKnight @ Jan 2nd 2009 12:10AM]

You're wrong. Windows 7 is Vista Pro! The underlying core components came straight from Vista.

[Boards of Canada @ Dec 31st 2008 9:36PM]

Oh ironic, Microsoft and Windows 7 will run on less ressources... its kind of good!

Ho shit, if they base the layoff on seniority, that poor little Indian girl is up for an happy new year!

[jakem @ Dec 31st 2008 10:58PM]

That's a terrible thing to say. It's also a silly thing to say considering that Microsoft India is responsible for service packs.

[Boards of Canada @ Jan 1st 2009 1:09AM]

Dont worry for her... she's 9 years old, a genius, and probably already quite famous on tv there...

[cjMichael @ Dec 31st 2008 10:16PM]

Hello...from what I see of Windows 7 it could be called Vista2!.
It appears to be built on the same code base and apparently still uses Vista's Aero Glass (remember that?).
If Microsoft wants to join the OS world it has to get the idea that patents are dead.
This is after all 2009 and we have been using PCs for more than a decade, so we don't need balloons to tell us everything from we are connected to we can now remove a device!
We will continue to use the free OS Linux and ever growing mainstream Ubuntu.

PS. We also DO NOT want to send Microsoft a report...so stop asking.

[gonintendo @ Dec 31st 2008 10:25PM]

Not vista 2, it's more like vista's attractive, muscular, and agile cousin who vista envies and strives to imitate but it is held back by it's uncontrollable weight gain and a few stomach ulcers here and there.