Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Following the order to pay $388 million in damages, and the shutdown of both Encarta and adCenter Analytics, Microsoft has announced that it has fired 3,000 employees in its second wave of the company’s cost-cutting initiative.
Microsoft employees received the following email from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bearing the bad news yesterday:
From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009
To: Microsoft – All Employees
Subject: Update: Realigning Resources and Reducing CostsIn January, in response to the global economic downturn, I announced our plan to adjust the company’s cost structure through spending reductions and job eliminations. Today, we are implementing the second phase of this plan.
This is difficult news to share. Because our success at Microsoft has always been the direct result of the talent, hard work, and commitment of our people, eliminating positions is hard.
Today’s action includes positions in the United States and in a number of countries around the world. In the U.S., affected employees will be notified directly by their managers today. In other countries, local leadership teams will provide more specific information about the impact to their organizations.
With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010. We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it’s important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible, and so that organizations can concentrate their efforts and resources on strategic objectives.
As we move forward, we will continue to closely monitor the impact of the economic downturn on the company and if necessary, take further actions on our cost structure including additional job eliminations.
For those of you directly affected by today’s announcement, I want to thank you for your contribution to Microsoft and assure you that we will continue to provide support as we did during the previous job eliminations.
And for everyone across the company, I want to reemphasize how much I appreciate the way you have pulled together to help the company respond to this difficult economic environment. There’s no doubt that these are very challenging times. But together, we are making the right choices to ensure that we will continue to deliver great products and position ourselves for strong future growth and profitability.
Thank you for your continued hard work, commitment, and focus.
Steve
The announcement is part of the second phase of Microsoft’s announcement in January to remove 5,000 full-time employees from its payroll by June 2010. 1,400 employees were let go then, with 3,000 more being asked to leave now. That means that the job cuts are nearly over, which totaled around more than 5% of the software giant’s workforce.
The victims of today’s job cut are from various countries around the world, including the US.
As mentioned in the email, fired employees have until next year June to find a new place to work, and Microsoft has informed everyone that it has set aside $237 million for severance for laid-off employees.
Microsoft is still planning to hire 2,000-3,000 new employees within the next 18 months.
But what good will that do financially?
[via ComputerWorld]
