Microsoft Posts Weak Earnings, Cutting 5,000 Jobs

Not enough for a new Yacht this year, so we're gonna fark over a whole lot of you.
 
bpmurrGT said:
I didn't speak of it as a dirty word. I'm just saying they still made a profit. Usually you don't cut things until you start losing money. I have no problem with making money. Just sometimes the things companies do just for a few percent seems slimy.
Click to expand...

Until you realize that "few percent" can mean a world of difference to their hundreds of thousands of share holders...
 
Arcygenical said:
Until you realize that "few percent" can mean a world of difference to their hundreds of thousands of share holders...
Click to expand...

Yup, I'm in the business and very aware. I also remember when the market wasn't so "sensitive".
 
Exactly. Top responsibility for a publicly traded company is to the shareholders--they own the company, they want the company to grow, they expect expenses to be cut.

Arcygenical said:
Until you realize that "few percent" can mean a world of difference to their hundreds of thousands of share holders...
Click to expand...
 
Tokamak said:
Well, considering this piece of news flies directly in the face of what you just said, I think you'd need some proof.

This is another example of the economy dips, companies slash jobs which causes the economy to dip further, so they slash more jobs, etc etc.

To those who say it's just business so don't complain, we currently have a perfect right to complain and lower our opinion of the company which may affect our purchase decisions in the future. Because guess what? That's business too.
Click to expand...

I think you missed my point. If there were other viable alternatives to reduce costs I think they would have rather pursued those because job losses are now a huge core problem in the economy. You do what you have to do, it doesn't mean that you don't realize that there can be negatives associated with the action.
 
bpmurrGT said:
Yup, I'm in the business and very aware. I also remember when the market wasn't so "sensitive".
Click to expand...

Those were the days eh...? A stock market, where a single "pundit" ("Media-ish" is a funny language, we can roughly translate pundit to douchebag in English) couldn't blog a bunch of bloody lies and send prices tumbling.
 
Thats 5,000 less people buying $100+ products from Microsoft.

How about they cut the executive pay?
 
Why do you, monkeygod, use the word socialist like it's a bad word? America is a socialist country (go cry about it) and Atlas Shrugged is failed economics to fool high school kids that want to pretend they've had tough lives. We made fun of that drivel and Ayn Rand's mindless followers in upper econ classes.
 
Monkey God said:
Stop crying you socialist nannies, its not anybody's responsibility to give you a job.
Click to expand...

I don't necessarily disagree...

HOWEVER i do also firmly believe in the concept of company loyalty both ways. This one way street is a little fucked up.

Also, again while you have a good point... there is still the issue of performance. If you are performing well you shouldn't have to fear for your job unless the whole company tanks. I have seen people who are damn good at what they do get cut.

Socialism isn't the winner, but for capitalism to work properly some of the business politics needs to die. Its the same reason communism looks good on paper but sucks when anyone tries it.
 
so in light of this i wonder when Bill is going to make his Jobs-like Emergence and return to lead MS again. I really think the ship ran better with Gates at the direct command
 
snowden said:
Why do you, monkeygod, use the word socialist like it's a bad word? America is a socialist country (go cry about it) and Atlas Shrugged is failed economics to fool high school kids that want to pretend they've had tough lives. We made fun of that drivel and Ayn Rand's mindless followers in upper econ classes.
Click to expand...


"To the REPUBLIC for which it stands.."

Need me to write any more?
 
I wonder how many of the 5000 people that are being laid-off are from there Guest Workers' H-1B visas. :rolleyes:
 
When are most of you going to learn that a corporation isn't your fucking personal God Damned charity. A company isn't there to hold your fucking hand. It isn't there to uplift your self-esteem. A company isn't your personal valet where you expect to get something for nothing. You are there to work and get paid for your work and when the company decides it no longer needs you to work for it, then you are gone. Cry about it all you want, but either go work for yourself and set up your company as a charity or just shut the fuck up and find another job. Go to where the jobs are, not have them come to you. This is life, deal with it. This is how companies work, deal with it. You willingly give up some of your life force for 8 or so hours a day for monetary compensation. If you want to work for free for the betterment of everyone else while your life force gets sucked out of you so you can feel good about it, then join a commune.

God damn it if the entitlement mentality that some of you show is just off the charts irrational if not bordering on mentally unstable. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this attitude of many of you isn't going to get any better. You think this economic problem is bad, well, you really don't know what bad is.
 
snowden said:
Why do you, monkeygod, use the word socialist like it's a bad word? America is a socialist country (go cry about it) and Atlas Shrugged is failed economics to fool high school kids that want to pretend they've had tough lives. We made fun of that drivel and Ayn Rand's mindless followers in upper econ classes.
Click to expand...

Socialism means you take from those who work and give it to those who don't. I find that repulsive. Succeed or fail, on your own merits. Is that such an offensive concept to you?
 
On a different angle, I'm actually surprised Microsoft hasn't gone the way of some other major companies and eliminated guidance and earning estimations completely.
 
america is headed for all-out socialism and i dont think there's any way around it. its not a completely evil concept yet i would much rather be in a capitalist society that is free of major corruption.
 
Methadras said:
When are most of you going to learn that a corporation isn't your fucking personal God Damned charity. A company isn't there to hold your fucking hand. It isn't there to uplift your self-esteem. A company isn't your personal valet where you expect to get something for nothing. You are there to work and get paid for your work and when the company decides it no longer needs you to work for it, then you are gone. Cry about it all you want, but either go work for yourself and set up your company as a charity or just shut the fuck up and find another job. Go to where the jobs are, not have them come to you. This is life, deal with it. This is how companies work, deal with it. You willingly give up some of your life force for 8 or so hours a day for monetary compensation. If you want to work for free for the betterment of everyone else while your life force gets sucked out of you so you can feel good about it, then join a commune.

God damn it if the entitlement mentality that some of you show is just off the charts irrational if not bordering on mentally unstable. And I have a sneaking suspicion that this attitude of many of you isn't going to get any better. You think this economic problem is bad, well, you really don't know what bad is.
Click to expand...

Its funny, its this precise entitlement attitude (I want a big house and a nice SUV even though im too stupid/lazy to get a good enough job to afford one) so "socialist" government officials write laws to force the relaxation of lending practices causing overextension in all aspects of the financial sector and now that this unrealistic policy is blowing up in peoples faces, they want MORE government control, as if fucking with common sense and personal responsiblity MORE is going to fix it.

This the land of opportunity, not handouts. Go live in 70-80% tax rate northern europe if you wanna be a bum your whole life.
 
It's a good excuse as any to get rid of all the deadwood in the company, which might even improve overall productivity. As far as I know, they haven't had any major cuts in a while, so there's probably lots of extra, unproductive employees still hanging around. After all, the company's first responsibility is to the shareholders, who want max profits.

The bulk of their expenses is tied in salaries if you check their income statement so cutting costs here makes sense if they can still be competitive. Often times, a company's stock price will go up after job cuts if the market feels it was a good cost cutting measure.
 
Tolyngee, your an idiot if you think thats how it works, tell youve never coded for a real project

and Monkey God, you could have just said Clinton instead of all that, its all the same. But you do spell out the point clear enough for the bitchers and complainers here to get the idea, even tho they wont.
 
ITT, a bunch of people think that today's corporations succeeded thanks to the sole efforts of their executives, and not on the backs of the thousands of hard-working individuals that actually did the day-to-day work and just got laid off. Meanwhile execs continue to rake in multi-million-per-year salaries.

It's not about socialism you sheep. It's about the fact that a company that is seeing a bit of a profit hit slashes thousands of salaries down to zero instead of one salary down a few thousand. The whole reason people protest layoffs like these are because workers -- not non-productive socialist leeches, as you like to generalize them as, but actual, hard-working and skilled employees -- lose their jobs, absolutely everything. And on the other end of the spectrum, the executives actually making the decisions that largely determine success or failure? They don't even see a pay hit, let alone lose a job. If you have ten workers making 100K per year each, and a CEO making 14 million a year, you can knock a million off of his salary -- leaving him with 13 million per year, still far, far more than he can ever possibly use -- and keep those ten workers employed. If they're non-producers, go ahead and cut them, but I find it impossible to believe there are that many people at Microsoft just sitting around doing nothing. It might even be understandable if the company was actually losing money, but it wasn't.

It was still profitting several billion dollars.

Profit is not a bad word. But in the context of a company raking in billions of dollars and then terminating a couple million worth of employees, that's just greed. It is safe to say that at least a portion of those workers were not slashed to keep company profits up. They were slashed to keep executive salaries in place at their current levels whilst maintaining that profit.
 
It's useless to discuss socialism with people who fail to even realize America is a Socialist country that uses capitalist markets to determine utility most of the time. Those capitalist markets fail in many cases, hence we use socialist intervention even in America. It would be stupid not to.

But you are simply quoting Rush Limbaugh at me, and I know I can't have an intelligent discussion with an Ayn Rand fanatic. Why I even bother trying to spread a little economic knowledge here I don't know...
 
And what the hell does America being a Republic have to do with America using Socialism to run the economy?

You people don't even know what socialism is. At this point every western country is socialist. Get over it.
 
Profit is not a bad word. But in the context of a company raking in billions of dollars and then terminating a couple million worth of employees, that's just greed. It is safe to say that at least a portion of those workers were not slashed to keep company profits up. They were slashed to keep executive salaries in place at their current levels whilst maintaining that profit.
Click to expand...

It's not "greed" when it's fiscally UNLAWFUL to sacrifice a stock's trading price to help a select few keep their jobs. How do you people not get that?

If you have ten workers making 100K per year each, and a CEO making 14 million a year, you can knock a million off of his salary -- leaving him with 13 million per year, still far, far more than he can ever possibly use -- and keep those ten workers employed.
Click to expand...

So, to save 5000 jobs, they'd need to - collectively - cut CEO salaries by 500000000$? I see...
 
Companies cut people all the time - it's just that much more of a story cause the economy is bad and everyone is looking around saying "look, here's more evidence!"

And MS's main business is serving the enterprise community. If major companies around the world are tanking, and they are, they're going to get hit hard
 
you sir are a moron. as someone who lost my job to these cuts (they started back in september), i was not part of the "fat" or a "non-productive employee". That much is shown by the fact that I had no problem landing on my feet. I enjoyed my experience at microsoft, and realize i'm not like everyone who was laid off, and I know even good talent has to go some times, but your assumption was just ignorant and stupid. end rant!

calikool said:
Every company has it's duty to cut off the fat from non-productive employees and departments so they can be more profitable and the share price can increase. They are a public company and with the economy being so bad and a lot of companies not implementing Vista into Enterprise, they really only make money off of Office, vista and server 2003. They have to extend XP sales some more.
Click to expand...
 
Mmm, interesting, both on the same front page of HardOCP, 'Microsoft Posts Weak Earnings, Cutting 5,000 Jobs' and 'Apple Trounces Wall Street Estimates!'

Thats gotta hurt!
 
Also, let's not forget that these job cuts will be over an 18 month period. Now if any of you can predict the outcome of 5k employees across an 18 month time gap with respect to the economic outlook, then I have swamp land you can buy.
 
snowden said:
It's useless to discuss socialism with people who fail to even realize America is a Socialist country that uses capitalist markets to determine utility most of the time. Those capitalist markets fail in many cases, hence we use socialist intervention even in America. It would be stupid not to.

But you are simply quoting Rush Limbaugh at me, and I know I can't have an intelligent discussion with an Ayn Rand fanatic. Why I even bother trying to spread a little economic knowledge here I don't know...
Click to expand...

This statement alone is 80 directions of clueless. I couldn't even begin to start to school you on the complete sham you've just regurgitated and are perpetrating by writing this garbage.
 
snowden said:
It's useless to discuss socialism with people who fail to even realize America is a Socialist country that uses capitalist markets to determine utility most of the time. Those capitalist markets fail in many cases, hence we use socialist intervention even in America. It would be stupid not to.

But you are simply quoting Rush Limbaugh at me, and I know I can't have an intelligent discussion with an Ayn Rand fanatic. Why I even bother trying to spread a little economic knowledge here I don't know...
Click to expand...

.. this socialism in Gov argument is a moot point - your new Prez has already aimed his bullets @the free-wheeling mentality of the past and most seem to agree. Here in Aussie, we have always had this method of Governance, it just got lost in the big Ponzie that was the 1996-2007 share market. Batten down the hatches, worse is still to come unfortunately..
 
snowden said:
It's useless to discuss socialism with people who fail to even realize America is a Socialist country that uses capitalist markets to determine utility most of the time. Those capitalist markets fail in many cases, hence we use socialist intervention even in America. It would be stupid not to.

But you are simply quoting Rush Limbaugh at me, and I know I can't have an intelligent discussion with an Ayn Rand fanatic. Why I even bother trying to spread a little economic knowledge here I don't know...
Click to expand...

What knowledge exactly have you spread besides your hatred of Ayn Rand? And I never said I was a fanatic. I just suggested someone read a book. The concept was, if you continue to push socialism to an extreme, pretty soon everyone wants to TAKE and no one wants to GIVE. Get it? Want to know why health care is so damn expensive? Illegals and freeloaders going to the ER every time they get a sniffle, because they can. Want to know why car insurance is so expensive? People those of us who pay have to cover those that dont.
 
snowden said:
And what the hell does America being a Republic have to do with America using Socialism to run the economy?

You people don't even know what socialism is. At this point every western country is socialist. Get over it.
Click to expand...

Yes, thats the way! If something is screwed up everywhere, might as well just roll over and accept it!
 
Monkey God said:
Yes, thats the way! If something is screwed up everywhere, might as well just roll over and accept it!
Click to expand...

No kidding.

I'd agree that we've been HEADING toward a socialistic government since probably Clinton, but it doesn't mean we have to go full blown. Obama will change all that though...
 
CNN had a spot on this, and they are invetigating if they fired any H1 people, as last year bill gates was going on and on and on about how they need more engineers and trying to up the limit of H1 (foreigners) people the company can hire and bring into the country to which was already shown they bring them in to the U.S and pay them far less then the average worker.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top