14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella announced a massive layoff last week that would leave 18,000 Softies without a job, and more details are now emerging regarding employees that would leave the company in the next 12 months.
Now the internal memo sent by Terry Myerson, head of the operating system group within Microsoft, to employees has reached the web, revealing a little bit something about the changes that are expected to take place as part of the layoff.
While Myerson doesn’t say much about the people that are expected to get fired, he does make some interesting statements, indicating that the group wants to focus on the essential products with higher priorities.
Here’s one of the most interesting paragraphs in his letter (you can read it in full in the box after the article):
“As Satya shared last week, and we’ve been discussing for almost a year, we are making broad changes in how we engineer products. Thus, today we are restructuring some parts of our team in three areas: consolidating some of our geographically distributed teams, cancelling some projects to increase investment on higher priorities, and changing the ratio of people working across disciplines as part of our new engineering process.”
According to unconfirmed reports, Microsoft is planning to fire Windows testers, but instead ask other employees, including managers, to learn new skills in order to lean the process of creating new versions of the operating system and updates.
While this hasn’t been confirmed, it might make sense given the fact that Microsoft wants to bring new Windows versions to the market at a faster cadence, but it’s not yet clear whether the release schedule would be affected on the short term or not.
The most important reference in Myerson’s letter points to some “canceling projects” that, given the fact that we’re discussing about the Windows group, could really be something big.
Of course, this surely doesn’t have anything to do with the high-priority projects that Myerson was talking about, and which most likely include the Windows operating system itself, but it’s still a sign that Microsoft is rethinking its strategy and the products that were initially supposed to hit the market in the coming years.
If you’re wondering, Windows 9 is expected to hit the market in April 2015, but it remains to be seen if this job cut has affected development of the new operating system in any way.