Microsoft is laying off thousands in a major global sales reorganization | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is laying off thousands in a major global sales reorganization

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150 pointsgk199 comments

Microsoft have been very successful in transitioning their commercial clients to Office365 in Australia. Their focus is now probably on growing Azure as fast as possible, as well as other key areas such as Power BI and Dynamics365. And of course doubling down on building out their developer ecosystem, where they lost so much mindshare under Ballmer for the better part of a decade at least.

Not suprised to read this, they probably have a bunch of folk still selling their "old tech" and need to move them on (or reskill, where there are job openings).

Yes, given how rapidly all of their products are becoming cloud focused with on-premise a secondary focus it is hardly surprising that they are having to restructure their sales teams. It's a completely different commercial offering.

It actually stings a bit as a dev at a shop that really needs onprem - every time I see new TFS features that are cloud-only I feel a bit snubbed.

I think a lot of people are going to be feeling that pain over the next few years - MS has really gone all out for cloud based services.

How about Azure Stack?

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/

Isn't that a rather small subset of Microsoft's online services?

It is, but its a pretty core set of functionality.

That's where they would say that the cloud is architecture and not a place.

I really think that for most Microsoft shops that Azure stack is the only way that they should be thinking about on-perm systems.

They do with my business. They constantly come in to try to add more services on to our O365 model. However, it's like talking to old salespeople about a new product they have never used. It's like pulling teeth and my team has to come up with their own solutions instead of Microsoft selling us a complete one. I for one am happy to hear they are doing this.

If you want to amuse yourself, ask Microsoft how to install Visio and/or Project with Office 365 Office without spending any money on "upgrading" your license.

They have an online version of Visio now, so that trick will only work with Project... Of course, they are probably launching an online version of Project as well.

You cannot mix editions in many circumstances. There is a "Click to Run Perpetual" install method now, which doesn't work with multiple activation (i.e. Citrix/VDI) mode.

SharedComputerActivation has been around for a while now and the C2R + Visio bug was fixed in mid 2016.

Tell my Microsoft SE and DSEs.

The article mentions their increasing focus on Azure.

I'm amazed by the number of people we're talking about. If you follow the links in the article back a few years, it appears Microsoft has laid off close to 30-40,000 people in the last 4 years, less than half of which were from Nokia. But with a global workforce in the range of 120,000 people, I guess that's not completely out of proportion.

If that number doesn't include the new layoffs. Then I dont know, ~20K lay offs excluding Nokia and including this new one does seem like a lot for 120K employees. Over 15% in 4-5 years.

The good part is perhaps that all these applications are going to have to be rewritten at some point in the future on a different platform. I'm a Microsoft developer on Dynamics and it is unbearable (comparable to SharePoint).

The gap between a native consumer and 'enterprise' application experience only seems to be widening.

As a developer who has to use Dynamics I can't even imagine having to develop on it. My heart goes out to you.

I have a great sympathy for any developer that must work with/on/for Dynamics. I've been Dynamics-adjacent enough to see some of the pain secondhand and lucky enough not to experience it firsthand.

The very well maintained MSDN documentation pages for X++ are some of my favorite pages to send to developer friends as the developer equivalent of "ghost stories" when you sit around fireside chatting about the Daily WTF or MUMPS.

The X++ stuff is for the product formerly known as AX though? Based on my experience with AX its a lot nicer than JDE or SAP.

To my knowledge, X++ has been supported by the entire Dynamics line at various points in time. I remember hearing some complaints about it in Dynamics CRM more than a decade ago...

To be fair to X++, yes most everything its competitors do are worse, but being the best at being the worst is a strange and dubious honor. Similarly, X++ has done a lot of work to somewhat keep up with the times including a deeper integration into/with the .NET CLR allowing for better interop with Microsoft's DevDiv languages, etc.

That's part of what makes it such a good ghost story is that it is well maintained, has good intentions, has been somewhat modernized and more. But it's still a chimera of a language whose origination story was "we need bits of C++, XML, and SQL smashed into the same language".

Might that have been the "CRM" element of AX rather than the separate Dynamics CRM - which seems to be a completely different beast technically to the other members of the Dynamics family (if you can call things a family when they are so loosely related...).

Yes, may have been Dynamics AX CRM or some cross-work between CRM and AX CRM. Another place where Microsoft Sales & Marketing muddies the waters and confuses similar but different products, hah.

(My adjacency at the time was as an intern in Dynamics building way back in Ought Six, having lunch and listening to complaints from fellow interns. I wasn't working on Dynamics at the time, I was interning on the very cool Small Business Accounting [RIP] program that shared entirely no DNA with AX or Dynamics other than building space, because there wasn't a good way to make an AX Lite. Given the distance in time and space, forgive a forgetful mind. :)

Do you mean Dynamics CRM?

Or Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (formerly Dynamics AX)?

Or one of the other Dynamics GP, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics SL, Dynamics C5?

They are all under this umbrella brand, but quite different software products.

I have only been exposed to Dynamics CRM (Dynamics CRM 2011 through to Dynamics 365) I must admit. I can't imagine the experience for these other product strands to be much better for developers let alone users though.

As an older, former developer who has pretty much decided to pursue a career in MS Dynamics, I am having a great deal of difficulty trying to find useful information on which "track" to pursue, especially considering the change (?) Dynamics365 may be bringing to the model. (By track I mean, which product to focus on, AX vs CRM I assume are the most reasonable options, and technical vs functional (if that's the correct terminology)). And, where best to find good training and a strategy for getting one's foot into the door.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Curious...if you need advice on this, what led you to decide it was the one thing worth pursuing?

It seems like one of the few technical fields (outside of pure dev) left that has possibly somewhat safe jobs for the time being, and seems safer from being automated or optimized away. On top of an already tough tech job market, Canada has recently passed new legislation allowing companies to import tech works in less than two weeks with no requirement to prove they can't find local resources. I'm looking for something technical with an English language skills barrier, that is also useful for eventually immigrating to the United States.

They can see the writing on the wall. For both consumers and business users, a PC with a full OS is a liability compared to a lightweight client machine and cloud services (either hosted in Azure or on-premises).

The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s. Remember client-server? Only now, it's practical. The universal client (web browser) is all most users need. The nightmare of managing local installations of the client software is gone. Management of user PCs, drivers, updates, dealing with malware, is all going to be a thing of the past.

Yeah, I remember the JavaOS for the NC (Network Computer) and the terminals sold by Sun and Oracle.

What I hate on the so called universal client is that we could have had a proper solution with XHTML and all the XML semantic derivatives, instead we get a document model pretending to be an UI framework.

WebComponents seem to still be WIP.

Worse is better seems to apply here . To be honest it seems like modern frameworks Comp like down to HTML. In a decade maybe WHATWG will standardize components that are compatible with all the frameworks (React , Angular , Vue ). Also the velocity of these JavaScript frameworks encourages worse is better to the extreme.

> The wheel has circled back around to the early 1990s

Try late 60's with time-sharing.

True, but that's more like the web of 10 years ago when the client side was dumb and everything was processed and rendered on the server.

Right - the Ken Olsen quote.

The difference being that if you, the vendor, make a piggish mess of JavaScript soup, you only hurt yourself because it runs on your machine. Today, Google doesn’t care the GMail tab is hogging all the resources of the machine on which it executes because they’re my resources, not Google’s.

> lightweight client machine.... The universal client (web browser) is all most users need.

That was quite funny. Of all heavy-weight professional applications I currently use, the modern web browser is the very worst resource hog (even when running rather simple web-apps). Even VS2017 can't beat it.

The browser is finally starting to deliver as the universal interface, and with it, the resource hogging. Seems odd when laptops are maxed out on RAM for running the browser.

But when people start mentioning in alienware gaming laptop reviews (the laptops with GTX1080, the non-mobile version, and 64G of RAM) that it still doesn't run 80 tabs smoothly ... it might be time to rethink some of the software architecture of browsers.

Ha, I have to admit I saw one of those GTX1080 laptops and it made me wonder if it would help enough with handling an unreasonable number of browser tabs.

Browsers consume some 10x-20x resources comparing to a native application that performs exactly the same task.

In my experience, which is similar to experiences that friends and colleagues in other places have had is that Microsoft started cracking down on EA audits in the last two years.

That's always a sign of dying business models. Oracle is the same boat... I've been told that the poobah salesguys don't even get paid on non-cloud sales.

EA audits?

probably Enterprise Agreements

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Enterprise_Agreement

In that case it's not necessarily a bad sign. Adobe did the same thing before and during its cloud transition and it seems to be fine. I feel that these audits are basically collecting money that's already on the table, even though the practice itself might seem petty.

Microsoft also seems on track for a successful cloud transition.

Seems like a case of the hammer and the anvil -- get people used to paying actual license costs for shrinkwrap software, and not considering "we can pay for X seats and use X+250 copies" as one of the benefits of shrinkwrap over cloud.

Microsoft and Oracle are in very different positions.

I d heard that same thing, though, on Azure being what gets sales people bonuses.

That's pretty good reasoning.

One other area it'd be nice for them to tackle and simplify is their licensing scheme --even their own people are not always sure what licensing applies where. They seriously need to streamline that aspect of their business --granted this affects mostly their legacy business but that isn't going away overnight.

I agree, but on the plus side, smaller firms and newer businesses are able to take advantage of the newer model, which is both easier for clients and more profitable for MS. I'm actually looking at dumping Google Apps for biz and migrating to O365 myself due to the integrations with Azure AD etc.

Reminds me of the time I visited Microsoft's 'campus' in the UK - in a posh business park near to Reading, with nice views over the Thames.

I was expecting the place to be filled with boffins and assorted geniuses, but instead there were sales account managers for things like Microsoft Golf - didn't realise that you would have regional sales executives, e.g. for the 'south west of England' for such products. Then there were bean counters with licencing to get right, but no 'boffins'.

I felt that I had accidentally been on the 'Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B; for the day.

The "boffins" are over at the Microsoft research units, there's one in Cambridge and one in Edinburgh at least.

Surely, Microsoft needs one or two people to write the code for Windows, and can't rely on Microsoft Research for that.

Thames Valley Park is a sales & marketing office. There's a consulting services presence there too, but that really just supports sales & marketing. They do some cool stuff sometimes in the Microsoft Technology Centre though.

They always seemed to have quite a lot of games testers there as well(used to recruit for contract MS workers for Reading and London)

They used to do product development but nowadays it's all sales and marketing. The game testers the other commenter is talking about is centralized testing for Microsoft's remaining game studios. It's not very 'posh' either, at least when I was there, quite dated 90s looking offices. I think Microsoft development in general seems to heavily focused in basically the US and India. Exceptions of course, there's acquisitions like Skype and plenty of other examples dotted around but this place is hardly a 'campus' compared to Redmond or IDC.

Wow, between the techie, Brit, and geek language in this comment I'd love to show it to an American layman and watch the parse errors.

Sales offices and R&D offices are often separated. When I worked for Microsoft china, there was a nice office down the street from where I lived that I couldn't work at because it was for sales and biz people. The CEO of Microsoft china would also send everyone, including R&D, awkward emails about "making their numbers". It was like another world I only had a glimpse into.

There's really no reason for an SME to be running their own servers at this point. The folks selling SBS-type solutions need to re-engage their customers as Azure salespeople with an SME focus.

That depends on bandwidth, onprem makes sense when all you have is ADSL with less than 1Mbps up.

Only if whatever you're selling doesn't need access to those onprem resources remotely.

You're right, I was being a little myopic: first world countries except Australia should be cloud focused, otherwise onprem.

Many owners of SME expressed a lot of distrust towards "cloud" offerings. Even they are somewhat aware of industrial espionage and the risks of giving away control of central company assets like that. Microsoft tries to appease these concerns by e.g. having European companies control European operations (e.g. Telekom Cloud = Azure run by DTAG), but it doesn't seem to work that well — folks still assume that US courts and agencies have full access.

You're one payment away from losing everything. Nobody is going to shutdown a government or large company -- but will happpily shrug and wipe out a SMB.

Yes. At one point in time one of the SME owner asked if they could have Azure, or Office 365 Server hosted on perm. And they paid the rental price for the server and software instead of going all in on Cloud.

Yeah, I was referring to Australia. Getting NBN/Cable is a lottery, Telstra EOC/SHDSL requires your first born.

I mostly agree, but there are privacy and data retention issues. Running your own servers may make sense in some cases for those reasons.

do you think this flood of suits will create an bunch of companies whose business model relie on the menace of a licensing compliance audit?

Not really - it's entirely possible that the historical Microsoft licensing model (i.e. the kind that needs an audit) will pretty much disappear to be replaced by per-use costs (per user for SaaS and per capacity/storage/messages/... for PaaS and IaaS).

No, now the model is to sell subscriptions that you don't use, instead of shelf ware software.

The beauty of that is by underutilizing infrastructure, they get to enhance the services margins. The ugly is that you're always going to be in a vicious circle where you buy lots of bundled services that your service provider doesn't want you to use.

My personal favorite is Server 2003 custom support (I am pretty sure custom support was never intended to make as much revenue as it did):

https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/6b79sw/custom_su...

Twitter by Pinboard:

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/863410684192845825

I think this flood of suits will end up being employed by tier 2/3 "software" companies or unemployed.

I think calling people suits, nerds or bean counters is rather rude.

Azure is a solid product but if they get complacent, Google can clearly overtake them. Google has been pouring a lot of money and hiring industry leaders into thier cloud offering. They will use Tensor flow and bake it into all their cloud offerings. Microsoft has maybe a year to focus and get Azure to be a clear #2.

This makes sense. The financial future of Microsoft is dependent upon the continued success of Office 365, Azure, and Xbox. Everything else, probably including Windows OS itself, should be viewed as a distraction.

Hopefully this also means a reduction in bribes to national governments' ministers, but I doubt it.

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