More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here? Microsoft plans to lay off about 1,000 people across the tech giant, despite what CEO Satya Nadella described during the corporation's April earnings call as "a record third quarter." While reports have suggested Microsoft would cut as many 1,500 people just from its Azure for Operators group, The Register has been told that …
"... the layoffs are spread out across more business units, including the company's Mixed Reality group"
What on earth are they smoking? There is reality and unreality - its an either/or binomial thing. Reality is not a scale from real to Truss, nor a zoo of things that swim in and out of ... reality.
Perhaps you join a Mixed Reality group and find out that you work in reality in return for mixed (reality) rewards. Here have a P45 (US version of) for your hard work! Yay \o/
The issue has been one of expectations.
When something like this is marketed as the 'next best thing' rather than having an initial, defined use for the tech to form a foundation from which they can expand, there's no way it'll deliver on what's being promised.
Hence people expect the tech to work wonders, then it fails to deliver and people walk away. Meanwhile, if we're lucky, the tech is developing quietly, building that foundation, and from that we get something that actually is quite useful.
AKA: Blame marketing. They promised us rainbow farting unicorns instead of what can be achieved.
It's a classic example of a solution looking for a problem.
Computers are good at solving well defined and delimited problems quickly.
Humans are good at processing and understanding natural language, innovation, and creativity.
LLMs are somewhere in the middle, where they can do neither, but exist in the very small overlap between things that don't need to be done properly, and things that don't need to be understood properly.
Azure's security is a mess, Microsoft should be putting everyone they can on it to go over it with a fine-toothed comb instead of firing people to meet a target on a balance sheet.
What? You expect Micros~1 to actually fix something?!? Shirley, you jest!
With Microsquishy's focus on all things their marketing department can label as "with AI!!!(tm)" having it shoveled in regardless of rationality, sanity, relevance, or the wishes of the user community, I think Microsoft is destined to become the next Lotus/Borland. They've massively overspent and continue to overspend on a technology that users flat out do not want!
I have spent many an hour defending LLMs. But now, after 1 week of Copilot on Windows 11 I have lost faith.
They have destroyed LLMs. All that was great about AI pre-OpenAI ChatGPT3 has been destroyed. They have taken a potentially exciting and useful technology and completely IE4'd it.
MS have imposed personalised remote LLMs. This is comparable to plastering the internet with photos of yourself and your life in the social media days.
As a 10-year advocate of AI, I would now advise to stay away from LLMs as much as possible and if you do use it, never ever give any information about yourself.
Big picture: Current Wintel boxen are quite adequate. They need a new thing to convince people that they need a neural co-processor (and a whole new box to put around it), so AI is that thing. Never mind that nobody in their right mind needs it, they're pitching to people who cross the road (once, hopefully) while staring at their phone screen because it's a Sampple iGalaxy Note 58 Ultra with a DPI figure you need a scanning tunneling electron microscope to discern individual pixel clusters, not for the content. Sadly, it'll work, too. There are more phombies roaming around than technically literate people.
I still love that Google called their browser "Chrome." Chrome has a very specific meaning in tech circles: Unnecessary but very shiny fluff. This is exactly what this is and it's why both Chrome is the #1 browser and MS's gamble will work; people are stupid.
There is no Earthly reason Win11 needs that specification level they claim it does, either. It's simply to drive box sales.
Probably explains why I am being bombarded with "opportunities" to reserve "my" AI PC by preordering some skimpy Appleish (in price and appearance) notebook. As if?
Even I were given one of these the first thing I would do would be to "upgrade" the poor thing by removing its unpleasant AI+Windows infestation.
I imagine the hardware would be pretty decent and with an honest OS would run like the clappers.
@Doctor Syntax
Indeed.
Anyone who suggested Recall was a massive security nightmare would be:
"Not a team player"
"Obstructive"
"Neagtive"
"Not embodying the company philosophy"
"Living in the past"
"A naysayer"
etc. etc.
Keep firing until you are surrounded by yes men / women - a philosophy seen in many companies / sections of companies.
The same reason why older people (over 40) struggle to be employed in tech,
We are seen to be all of those by fast-track managlement idiots who have no experience so when they want to implement something that is total lunacy and you suggest there are better ways of doing it, all those boxes are ticked.
Experience means nothing, the only thing that matters is complying with the corporate line that is generally driven be people with absolutely no experience.
This one has really resonated with me. I used to be considered something of a space cadet; interested in pushing the bright ideas and what might be possible.
17 years in a particular outfit have, though bitter experience, taught me that the same old rope will attempt to be sold again and again. Changes in personnel mean that lessons have to be learned and re-learned the hard way. Rapid changes are rarely improvements and can often backfire. Actual progress is made by redirecting the supertanker with a teaspoon.
The optimist says perhaps things should not be that way; the realist (and experience) says that giant processes lead to unintended consequences when you fiddle with anything. And the only real way to progress is to build organisation in parallel to transfer over; rather than meddle with the status quot. (Or certain managers headcount-related obsessions).
In a former life at a bank, I recall a very senior analyst that I had a lot of time for, being publically fired for calling out over-exposure to sub-prime risk due to how mortgages were being securitised to disguise bad credit.
2007/08 happened; his analysis was vindicated; and he did subsequently take the former manglement tossers to court.
The causes? Various gits that feature on that (in)famous photo of Andy Hornby, Boris Johnson and other compatriot cronies content running their little scams and papering over the harsh mistress that is reality hoping they wouldn't get caught. Amongst others, of course, it was a global failure, not just them.
The consequences? Global financial failures, repossession hell for many, distorted housing markets that only continue to get worse?
Despite the piles of evidence, it still to this day amazes me that "sticking it to the man" is not universally approved.
"Microsoft's LinkedIn cut about 400 jobs"
I need some context. Is that a big number? Because if 401 people work at LinkedIn, that's epic. If 4_000_000 worked there, I guess they'll survive. What 400 worker years of work are not being done at LinkedIn now and would anyone notice? (I bet the people firing them can't even tell us that.)
"Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register in an email. "We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our customers and partners."
"Organizational and workforce adjustments are a necessary and regular part of managing our business to satisfy Wall Street quarterlies," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register in an email. "We will continue to prioritize and invest in strategic growth areas for our future and in support of our shareholder investors and market analysts."
FIFY
Call me sceptical, but wouldn't it be "weird" if their sales people claimed AI is increasing productivity so much that every worker can do 50% more work and Microsoft itself doesn't fire a lot of people? Then it would undermine the whole sales pitch for Microsoft's Copilot: "With our AI you can do so much more with less people employed and that will save you a small fortune." if they can't show they achieve it themselves. So hence Microsoft "has" to fire substantial numbers of people even during a record quarter. Wait, if they fire them during a record quarter all the better, then they can claim it's a record quarter because their AI increased output while reducing headcount! Double sales pitch bonus!
All these big businesses pushing AI like it's the solution to all our problems are surely missing something - if AI puts significant amounts of people out of a job, these people will no longer be able to purchase any products made by these big businesses who are pushing AI like its the solution to all our problems, resulting in these big businesses suddenly not having any customers. Don't they see this? Or do they see this and the 0.001% of people making these decisions only care about their own pocket and fuck the rest of us?
This is a good example of why any Microsoft worker should never feel loyalty to the organisation. They WILL fire you no matter how good or loyal you think you are. As soon as you don't fit in, are deemed not useful you are gone. Follow their example, as soon as you can find a better paid job with better conditions elsewhere fire them.
I've gotta say though that a salary of $193k sounds pretty hard to top.
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Even the most bitter employees can still feel a strong kinship with their peers when something like this happens. The culture is real, it's not fake or imagined. Maybe I could get more elsewhere, but I don't want to because I love what I do and I love the people I work with. Yeah, it could all go wrong, but this shit can happen anywhere. I just need to remember not to take it for granted.
$193k does sound nice, but in reality, it's ~£91k for me (including variable bonus) plus a lot of shares and other benefits.
I was willing to bet that AI would cause large scale job losses but I had thought that functional products would be needed first.
Looks like any company making large investments into AI will be cutting jobs anyway to fund the development of tech which will lead to job cuts.
Well lets be honest these companies have loads of cash to develop AI and could easily keep employees on but then their shareholders would lose a few percentage points that quarter. So the meatbags have to go.
Given that WMR is being removed in Windows 11 24H2, and has *already* been removed in insider builds (according to Wikipedia, although theReg covered this some months ago too), is it any surprise there are redundancies?
It's very poor really, seven year old perfectly functional hardware will stop working and presumably cannot be resurrected as VR headsets are pretty much one of the most proprietary and Windows locked technologies out there. True, there were very few VR applications in the Windows Store but that's a reflection on Windows Store, not VR, plenty of Steam apps worked just fine.
It would be very interesting if Microsoft released the source code under an open source license, but oink flap, that's unlikely.
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