Microsoft took an axe to another slice of its employees today, cutting around 3,000 jobs according to Mary Jo Foley. TechCrunch heard through a separate source that the layoffs were imminent, but was not able to confirm their size.
The company released a short statement indicating that it has nearly wrapped “all [of] the 18,000 reductions announced [it] in July.” Today’s cuts come from “many different business units, and many different countries,” the company indicated.
Presuming that the 3,000 figure for today is accurate (Microsoft did not respond to a comment asking if the figure was in the correct range) only a few hundred layoffs remain out of the original 18,000 that were announced. The majority of the reductions have come from Microsoft’s recently acquired Nokia hardware assets.
Taking into account the first set of 12,500, the second cut of 2,100 and today’s 3,000, 400 more firings may remain. That figure could be low. I’m hearing rumblings that the organizational re-jiggering of Microsoft is still a work in progress and that more layoffs could be part of those continued changes.
I spoke to a source close to Microsoft’s campus who indicated that morale among employees there hasn’t been diminished due to the staffing rollbacks, though the company’s main location hasn’t been too heavily hit in the cuts.
On Business Insider, Julie Bort reported that there is some complaint that change is happening too quickly. If that is a common sentiment on campus, quite a number of employees are likely not going to have a fun next few years.
