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Microsoft is laying off thousands in a major global sales reorganization
- nippples 9y agoI wish they'd lay off their lobbyists pushing their wretched anti-FOSS spywareOS on our governments and schools.
- keganunderwood 9y agoCall me petty and vengeful but every dollar the government wastes on Microsoft's useless spyware os is a dollar not spent on Oracle / people soft. Oracle seems to have the best salespeople and good for them but I hate how our tax dollars are going to Larry Ellison.
- computerex 9y agoWhat the hell? What impresses you so much about Oracle?
- nulldev 9y agoHe's impressed at the caliber of Oracle's sales team since they can actually sell Oracle products. Frankly, I agree and would like to know what kind of jedi mind tricks those guys use on their customers.
- windows_lover 9y agoWindows is a strong and stable operating system, and the best choice for the security of your family and your country.
- Hasknewbie 9y agoNot sure non-Brits will get the sarcasm.
- nulldev 9y agoSarcasm? On my HN?
- honestoHeminway 9y agoOf course he who wants safety, also must have advertising. If you are anti-advertising, you are pro-terrorism.
- westmeal 9y agoIt's more likely than you might think!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bobsil1 9y agoWe May
- seesomesense 9y agoAnyone who dares suggest otherwise, must have been suborned by Mr Putin, ISIS or Mr Andrew Breitbart...
- seesomesense 9y agoFrom the number of downvotes I have received, I can see that sarcasm is a foreign concept to many.... (Do not despair, Mr Trump will make all these evil foreign things go away )
- mrkrab 9y agoThe alternative, in my experience, is that our government spends millions in creating a fork of Ubuntu, which is just regular Ubuntu with a different default set of packages, a custom background, and maybe one or two misc utilities (think of a disk formatter, etc) written in PyGTK which fucking suck. Obviously, after a few years, they get tired of that rubbish distro, and go back to Microsoft. Not to mention the fines the state has to pay when school teachers and other civil servants install Windows without licences and get caught. So, yes, better if they just keep using fucking Windows.
- coldtea 9y ago>Obviously, after a few years, they get tired of that rubbish distro, and go back to Microsoft. Funny you should say that, because it has happened exactly that way in the past (e.g. in Germany): http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-a-10-year-linux-migration-munich-considers-switching-back-to-windows-and-office/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/after-a-10-year-linux-migration...
- mrkrab 9y agoNothing in my post was a joke, because I've seen it happen here in person. And what's sad, is that anybody with half a brain could've expected the outcome. But of course, there are far too many people in the government who want a slice of cake.
- scriptproof 9y agoYou know that Munich is currently expecting Microsoft to create a big center in their city and the major (a pro-Microsoft guy) try to court them. That has nothing to do with the quality of Linux.
- coldtea 9y agoI don't think that's all of it (simple payola). While that might have been involved, as it says: The Second (deputy) Mayor of Munich, Josef Schmid, said the re-examination is necessary because of complaints from employees, who Schmid said are “suffering” in the transition. (...) Sabine Nallinger, who ran for mayor for the Greens, noted that data exchange was especially problematic and didn’t work properly. Schmid agreed, telling Munich’s largest newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, that “Linux is very expensive” because of the need for custom programming. And getting rid of all proprietary software isn’t realistically an option. That 2008 EC report noted that Munich uses 300 “specialised administrative software packages” to perform its official duties. Although the goal was to replace those proprietary applications with platform-independent alternatives, the reality is that most would probably end up running in Windows inside a virtual machine, which of course requires paying Microsoft a license fee.
- apapli 9y agoMicrosoft have been very successful in transitioning their commercial clients to Office365 in Australia. Their focus is now probably on growing Azure as fast as possible, as well as other key areas such as Power BI and Dynamics365. And of course doubling down on building out their developer ecosystem, where they lost so much mindshare under Ballmer for the better part of a decade at least. Not suprised to read this, they probably have a bunch of folk still selling their "old tech" and need to move them on (or reskill, where there are job openings).
- arethuza 9y agoYes, given how rapidly all of their products are becoming cloud focused with on-premise a secondary focus it is hardly surprising that they are having to restructure their sales teams. It's a completely different commercial offering.
- Pxtl 9y agoIt actually stings a bit as a dev at a shop that really needs onprem - every time I see new TFS features that are cloud-only I feel a bit snubbed.
- arethuza 9y agoI think a lot of people are going to be feeling that pain over the next few years - MS has really gone all out for cloud based services.
- nraynaud 9y agodo you think this flood of suits will create an bunch of companies whose business model relie on the menace of a licensing compliance audit?
- arethuza 9y agoNot really - it's entirely possible that the historical Microsoft licensing model (i.e. the kind that needs an audit) will pretty much disappear to be replaced by per-use costs (per user for SaaS and per capacity/storage/messages/... for PaaS and IaaS).
- Spooky23 9y agoNo, now the model is to sell subscriptions that you don't use, instead of shelf ware software. The beauty of that is by underutilizing infrastructure, they get to enhance the services margins. The ugly is that you're always going to be in a vicious circle where you buy lots of bundled services that your service provider doesn't want you to use.
- yuhong 9y agoMy personal favorite is Server 2003 custom support (I am pretty sure custom support was never intended to make as much revenue as it did): https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/6b79sw/custom_support_and_ms_quarterly_earnings_rsysadmin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/6b79sw/custom_su... Twitter by Pinboard: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/863410684192845825 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/863410684192845825
- johansch 9y agoI think this flood of suits will end up being employed by tier 2/3 "software" companies or unemployed.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI think calling people suits, nerds or bean counters is rather rude.
- mtgx 9y agoHopefully this also means a reduction in bribes to national governments' ministers, but I doubt it.
- Theodores 9y agoReminds me of the time I visited Microsoft's 'campus' in the UK - in a posh business park near to Reading, with nice views over the Thames. I was expecting the place to be filled with boffins and assorted geniuses, but instead there were sales account managers for things like Microsoft Golf - didn't realise that you would have regional sales executives, e.g. for the 'south west of England' for such products. Then there were bean counters with licencing to get right, but no 'boffins'. I felt that I had accidentally been on the 'Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B; for the day.
- pjc50 9y agoThe "boffins" are over at the Microsoft research units, there's one in Cambridge and one in Edinburgh at least.
- runeks 9y agoSurely, Microsoft needs one or two people to write the code for Windows, and can't rely on Microsoft Research for that.
- Spearchucker 9y agoThames Valley Park is a sales & marketing office. There's a consulting services presence there too, but that really just supports sales & marketing. They do some cool stuff sometimes in the Microsoft Technology Centre though.
- sghi 9y agoThey always seemed to have quite a lot of games testers there as well(used to recruit for contract MS workers for Reading and London)
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y agoThey used to do product development but nowadays it's all sales and marketing. The game testers the other commenter is talking about is centralized testing for Microsoft's remaining game studios. It's not very 'posh' either, at least when I was there, quite dated 90s looking offices. I think Microsoft development in general seems to heavily focused in basically the US and India. Exceptions of course, there's acquisitions like Skype and plenty of other examples dotted around but this place is hardly a 'campus' compared to Redmond or IDC.
- nailer 9y agoThere's really no reason for an SME to be running their own servers at this point. The folks selling SBS-type solutions need to re-engage their customers as Azure salespeople with an SME focus.
- locusm 9y agoThat depends on bandwidth, onprem makes sense when all you have is ADSL with less than 1Mbps up.
- pc86 9y agoOnly if whatever you're selling doesn't need access to those onprem resources remotely.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nailer 9y agoYou're right, I was being a little myopic: first world countries except Australia should be cloud focused, otherwise onprem.
- dom0 9y agoMany owners of SME expressed a lot of distrust towards "cloud" offerings. Even they are somewhat aware of industrial espionage and the risks of giving away control of central company assets like that. Microsoft tries to appease these concerns by e.g. having European companies control European operations (e.g. Telekom Cloud = Azure run by DTAG), but it doesn't seem to work that well — folks still assume that US courts and agencies have full access.
- Spooky23 9y agoYou're one payment away from losing everything. Nobody is going to shutdown a government or large company -- but will happpily shrug and wipe out a SMB.
- khana 9y agoBring it back home baby.
- perseusprime11 9y agoAzure is a solid product but if they get complacent, Google can clearly overtake them. Google has been pouring a lot of money and hiring industry leaders into thier cloud offering. They will use Tensor flow and bake it into all their cloud offerings. Microsoft has maybe a year to focus and get Azure to be a clear #2.
- thoughtexprmnt 9y agoThis makes sense. The financial future of Microsoft is dependent upon the continued success of Office 365, Azure, and Xbox. Everything else, probably including Windows OS itself, should be viewed as a distraction.