Washington - Microsoft has started cutting thousands of
positions, mostly in its sales department, days after announcing it would shift
its sales strategy to focus more on cloud services than on its traditional
server and desktop businesses.
"Microsoft is
implementing changes to better serve our customers and partners. Today, we are
taking steps to notify some employees that their jobs are under consideration
or that their positions will be eliminated," the company said in a
statement to The Washington Post.
"Like all companies, we
evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased
investment in some places and, from time-to-time, re-deployment in
others."
The job cuts were expected
after Microsoft's announcement last week. A majority of the cuts will be made
to positions outside of the United
States, the company said. Microsoft said
that thousands of jobs would be eliminated, but it declined to confirm reports
that place that figure at 3,000 positions.
There will also be a few
cuts at the firm's headquarters in Redmond,
Washington, the Seattle Times
reported. Cloud services have been the main focus for Microsoft chief executive
Satya Nadella since he took over the company in 2014 with a mandate to
modernize the firm for a mobile-first, cloud-first world.
Nadella, who came up through
the firm's cloud division, has narrowed Microsoft's focus and doggedly trimmed
the company's workforce.
In 2014, he announced he
planned to cut up to 18,000 jobs over the next year. Many cuts came from the
firm's smartphone division, which Nadella sold off in 2016, two years after his
predecessor purchased them for $7.2 billion. Last July, Microsoft said it would
has paid off for the software giant. In April, the company said that the Azure
division had grown its revenue by 93 percent over the same time period the
previous year. Its main rival for cloud dominance is Amazon - which is the
market leader with its Amazon Web Services - but Microsoft's strong growth has
cheered investors and impressed analysts. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey Bezos
is the owner of the The Washington Post.)
The cuts to the sales force
are meant to streamline Azure sales, in line with the simplified sales
philosophy outlined in an internal Microsoft memo leaked to press earlier this
week.