14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s new CEO Satya Nadella shocked pretty much everyone a few weeks ago when he announced the layoff of 18,000 employees following the acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services unit.
But despite this dramatic job cut, Satya Nadella is still backed by most of the employees, who still think that the company is heading in the right direction thanks to the man who replaced Steve Ballmer at the helm of the firm in February this year.
A report published by SFGate and citing sources from within the company reveals that most employees are still happy with Satya Nadella despite the shock caused by the layoff announced in July. The company is now “back to business as usual,” the source reports, while also adding that most Microsoft employees understood why the company needed to fire so many workers.
The Windows unit was one of the most impacted divisions within the company, several sources said, and today’s report confirms that plenty of test engineers have been fired, as Nadella wants a more streamlined process that would in the end bring Windows versions to the market at a faster cadence.
Satya Nadella is trying to push Microsoft off Steve Ballmer’s approach that transformed the software giant into a devices and services firm, and he is now attempting to push the company to a mobile-first, cloud-first world that could open new business opportunities in the long term.
At the same time, Nadella has explained that all company employees should work for the same goal and be obsessed over customers, as feedback and thoughts received from users are very important for the way all products are designed.
“Obsessing over our customers is everybody's job. I'm looking to the engineering teams to build the experiences our customers love. I'm looking to the sales and marketing organizations to showcase our unique value propositions and drive customer usage first and foremost,” Nadella said earlier this year after replacing Steve Ballmer at the helm of the company.
“In order to deliver the experiences our customers need for the mobile-first and cloud-first world, we will modernize our engineering processes to be customer-obsessed, data-driven, speed-oriented and quality-focused. We will be more effective in predicting and understanding what our customers need and more nimble in adjusting to information we get from the market.”
At this point, Satya Nadella has a CEO rating of 86 percent, according to Glassdoor.com, a lot better than his predecessor, whose best rating rarely went over 50 percent.