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Comment by tphan | Hacker News Reader

I knew Microsoft was on the way out but I didn't know the situation was so bad. Hopefully those who lost their jobs will find a place at Google or Apple.

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Sometimes, as was the case with Zynga for example, I get the sense that layoffs are an indicator of imminent demise.

For some reason, under Nadella, I get the feeling that these MSFT layoffs are an indicator of an imminent rise. Maybe it's just a story I'm looking for after watching Mayer at the helm of an increasingly relevant Yahoo.

Similarly, I really get the sense that MSFT under Nadella is going to be an exciting company to watch.

If people look beyond desktop, specifically to enterprise software and cloud computing it should be pretty clear that Microsoft is not in decline. If anything they are more in control and cohesive than ever..

In healthcare and government, MSFT has things owned at the desktop level. They may be losing at the home level, but they can just jack up their license fees (or move to more subscription models) to make up for it.

They are on the way out in the same sense as the sun is. Someday, but no time soon. They profit many billions every quarter, and it seems far fetched to guess that this move will do anything other than strengthen the firm.

Microsoft has a lot of cash and a huge mass of captive customers who will stay captive customers if they clean up their act just a little bit. I wouldn't call demise just yet. They will be around for a long time to come and may just surprise everyone.

Not that I care. I don't use Microsoft products and given the choice never will. And I don't care for their general behavior as a company. I never thought it was a good idea to have ubiquitous monolithic providers of essential software. But I'm a minority among computer users and I wouldn't count them out.

Governments and other bigco's are still as willing as ever to lock themselves into vendors. I don't see this changing soon at the OS level when they can't even sort themselves out at the application level.

Layoffs are fairly regular occurrences, and don't necessarily represent the end of a company. In fact, even if it wasn't just 5% of their workforce, and not mostly Nokia staff, it wouldn't be a concern — its just business as usual.

Companies often experience a raise in share-price after a layoff.

It's true this doesn't represent the end of a company. But layoffs of 1/20 of a large company's entire workforce are not regular occurrences, and are a cause for concern. It's the kind of thing you can do once, but not again for a long while; two layoffs of that magnitude within a short period, and you trigger a death-spiral where anyone who's left is looking for the exit.

Right after you buy a company that adds 20% more to your workforce? I think not.

It's more that with the purchase of Nokia, MSFT got 25k new employees which is kind of a lot.

While layoffs suck, I see this as positive for the company.

Layoffs are a sign that a company has been struggling, or has been slowing, or has grown disproportionately in personell, but that someone is doing something that probably needs to be done. It is not always the solution, but it is also not a sign of ultimate doom.

From what I've heard, if you're not working on cloud services, you're a dinosaur.

They just let go of XP and cloud services are making the need to support office version X for 10 years less relevant. MS must spend a ridiculous amount of time & treasure supporting old crap.

> MS must spend a ridiculous amount of time & treasure supporting old crap.

But backwards compatibility is kind of the reason why a lot of customers buy MS products.

They sold Windows 3.1 until the year 2008. I would agree that they spend way too many resources on the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x

They still sell embedded DOS. Supporting legacy products is good customer service. It's not like they were spending tons of resources to maintain the code.

Sometimes there is overlap, sometimes there is extra baggage, sometimes there is redundancy...What there is and what is left depends on how things are handled.

Sometimes the recurring "let the bottom 5% go" that companies like Cisco do might actually make sense.

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