The customary hatred of Microsoft is not the point here. This massive layoff in the pathetic Obama economy is. 18k is a lot of people. How would you like to be a Microsoft employee just now with this hanging over your head?

"Microsoft will slash 18,000 jobs from its payroll during the next 12 months, the company announced on Thursday, with the majority of the cuts to occur by the end of the year.

The headcount reduction, which amounts to roughly 14% of Microsoft's global workforce, is the largest in company history. Roughly 12,500 of the eliminated positions will come from integrating Microsoft's recently acquired Nokia Devices and Services Division; the deal to buy Nokia closed in April. Microsoft had more than 127,000 employees worldwide as of the beginning of June...

If you take Nadella at his word, the job cuts aren't simply a cost-cutting measure, as is sometimes the case in corporate downsizings, but a first step toward sweeping changes to how Microsoft operates.

"First, we will simplify the way we work to drive greater accountability, become more agile, and move faster. As part of modernizing our engineering processes the expectations we have from each of our disciplines will change," Nadella wrote in his email. That shift, even broadly described, makes sense given Microsoft's recent "mobile-first, cloud-first" drumbeat: if you want to sing that refrain, the development and testing cycles of the shrink-wrapped software of yore won't cut it.

It would appear, too, that the job cuts won't all come from the trenches. Nadella indicated Microsoft's org chart may look quite different by this time next year: "We plan to have fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making," he wrote. "This includes flattening organizations and increasing the span of control of people managers.""

http://www.informationweek.com/strategic.../d/d-id/1297364

A little addendum here which I had forgotten about:

"On Thursday, a week after former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates argued for amnesty and for an unlimited number of high-tech guest-worker visas, Microsoft announced it would slash 18,000 jobs...

Bill Gates, along with Sheldon Adelson and Warren Buffett, advocated removing "the worldwide cap on the number of visas that could be awarded to legal immigrants who had earned a graduate degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics from an accredited institution of higher education in the United States.""

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/...st-Worker-Visas

"But unlimited visas certainly is a great way to suppress salaries and job opportunities for Americans adn supply international corporate with cheap desperate labor whose status is equivalent to indentured labor."