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Comment by sgk284 | Hacker News Reader

This concerns me... I've got a ton of friends at Microsoft including my co-founder that is moonlighting with me on a start up (hopefully he won't need msft for much longer). I don't understand why a company that spends so much trying to get the best talent in the industry and has as much cash as Microsoft does would throw a good percentage (5.5%) of their workforce back to their competitors. Seems priorities are misplaced, not to mention the tons of negative morale that mass layoffs cause.

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Do you not think the competitors are going to have to reduce heads too?

There is some denial amongst the startup community at the moment - this recession will be very long, very painful and few will be exempt - those that cut early and cut deep may survive okay - if they have revenue.

"There is some denial amongst the startup community at the moment - this recession will be very long, very painful and few will be exempt"

That is not the consensus among economists: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node%2F2785

IBM expects a good 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/21/technology/companies/21blu...

IBM and other major hardware companies will still be living off budget spends that were set in 2007 and 2008 - these will not be reoccuring in 2009.

Enterprises now have vast quantities of surplus desktops and servers because of redundancies and contraction in the markets they operate (a recession is a contraction) - whatever you needed 3 servers for in 2008 you only need 2 now.

IBM are also living off the massive defence and security budgets under the Bush administration - this is all coming to an end. They are in for a very painful 09 H2 and 2010.

Any tech hardware company who thinks they are exempt from this is off their heads.

And any economist blogger who thinks this will all be over in 09 H2 is just whoring for pageviews.

For all we know, many of the layoffs are non-developers. Plus, there are developers that are sub-par at any firm of Microsoft's size so maybe they're trimming them as well.

Hopefully it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Dead wood must be hacked from the tree.

It's what Ballmer should have really said, but couldn't.

He'd have to start with himself, after all.

This is a good opportunity / excuse to get rid of some of the severely under performing people.

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