Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella announced the “streamlining” of the company last July with the news that 18,000 jobs would be cut, representing 14% of the total workforce at the Redmond-based technology giant.
The first redundancies happened in the same month with additional rounds in September and October. The process will be complete by June 30th this year. The Seattle Times reports that hundreds of employees were dismissed earlier this week as Microsoft turned 40 years old.
Many of the cuts come as a result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone and devices business in April last year. The company has been flooded with Nokia’s former workers and has also closed half the phone manufacturing facilities that it acquired with the purchase of the Finnish firm.
An email sent by Microsoft chief information officer Jim DuBois last Thursday told employees that positions across Microsoft were being eliminated in an effort to “remove role overlap, optimize activities and functions, align disciplines with the rest of Microsoft, and, perhaps most importantly, reshape IT for the skills we need to transform.”
In a statement Saturday, a company spokesperson told The Seattle Times: “We expect this to be the last of the anticipated broad cuts as part of the restructuring plan announced last July.”
The layoffs are affecting workers across Microsoft’s divisions and are not focused specifically on former Nokia employees. Microsoft Research, the cybersecurity group, Xbox and MSN have all seen cuts to their workforces alongside a large range of generic engineering and marketing roles.
The company’s efforts to streamline and refine itself are clearly impacting large numbers of people who are losing their jobs as a consequence. With 14% of the company’s employees dismissed over the past year, Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself as a less-complicated and slightly smaller company under CEO Satya Nadella’s guidance.
