January 2, 2009 by Jay Smith
Sorry if you were still feeling all upbeat and new yearsy, but I’m afraid I’ve got more tales of credit-crunch woe from the technological sector. It appears, according to the blogsphere (reliable sections thereof), that corporate giant Microsoft is expecting to make as many as 15,000 people redundant this month. Apparently redundancies will be announced on the 15th of January.
Such a massive wave of redundancies would translate to about 15% of the Microsoft workforce and represent the biggest mass layoffs in the history of the computer industry leader. Because this, as of yet, has no official confirmation the 15,000 number is soft, as is the date of January 15th. However, rumours of significant redundancies at the company have been circulating for months now – there’s fairly clearly going to be some large-scale pain for the Microsoft workforce.
Announcements of layoffs usually come around the time of the quarterly earnings releases. The next one for Microsoft is on the 22nd of January so the date is probably fairly accurate too.
If the company feels that layoffs on this scale are appropriate, it obviously doesn’t bode well for their earnings release. Although, the company has already predicted sales of around $17 billion and has made no moves to revise the figure.
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