Cloud sales shift as enormo Microsoft reorg continues – sources Microsoft is in the process of squishing more of its various sprawling limbs and partners into a single group. Multiple sources close to the tech giant have told us jobs would be cut during the upcoming revamp, although they could not name a number. Our sources are expecting a shift in the org chart of the tech behemoth, which …
With the current offerings blurring the lines between cloud and on-prem there's no commercial reason a Microsoftie's knowledge should be siloed to one world or another. The very human fact that they can't easily recall all the labyrinthine complexities might however be a complicating factor.
Not quite, but reorganizing the sales force can either mean someone has a clue or what I have experienced more often is a shuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic. If someone has a clue, the results should show in a couple of quarters as the backlog and bookings start to build. Otherwise, we have deck chair shuffling. Nadella seems to vaguely grasp that Slurp might have to cannibalize their own products something the PHBs running I've Been Moved never seemed to grasp.
"Microsoft has always followed in IBM's footsteps"
Not in terms of success. IBM tried to ignore that Microsoft existed - betting the bank on legacy *Nix mainframe and midrange systems - an approach which has made them a dead backwater that is on many company disinvest lists. Microsoft meanwhile have gone from strength to strength.
Just look at both companies share price over the last 5 years - IBM has barely moved - which is effectively a decline when you allow for inflation, whist Microsoft's has been a continual upwards climb...
"Not in terms of success."
Absolutely in terms of success. IBM was a behemoth long before MS came along, and it took a long time for MS to displace them. MS are now seeing themselves displaced too - in the late 90's and early 2000's they pretty much were the only game in town for personal computing. Now they are no longer the biggest player in the client platform game, nor in the change to cloud. Most of their core software products are slowly becoming a legacy middleware layer.
We are seeing the same pattern as with IBM as they move to a services company. It's a very slow change, but the tables have already begun to turn.
Eventually the same will happen to Google, AWS, etc as well. It's just the nature of the beast.
More like they had a set of very golden handcuffs that tied a big pot of money down until they'd been inside the Borg for a set period of time. Now that that time is up, they are taking the money and running off to their retirement island in the sun. Meanwhile, the rest of us plebs have to suffer the inexorable deterioration of a mostly fairly decent product into an abject mess.
I quit LinkedIn the day after the MS takeover was announced. Don't regret it one little bit. Posting AC just to be on the safe side.
It's played out the same way so many times it's now firmly part of computing history.
Good choice. Since its merger, I've witnessed Linkedin becoming more 'Microsofty' before my very eyes, as far as the user experience is concerned. And I don't mean it as a compliment.
It'll become yet another data mining resource for SatNad. Same as Swiftkey. However Linkedin has your personal information.
"All the top brass from Linked In are leaving too "
They are probably close porting everything from Play / Java / Oracle crud to .Net and IIS so have no further need for many of the senior staff members.
Likely Microsoft bought LinkedIn mostly for the product concept and the membership rather than the staff...
"They are probably close porting everything..."
That would be typical Microsoft - still stuck in their NIH ways. If .Net and IIS were really so brilliant with such a low TCO, why is it so infrequently chosen by big web services over other solutions? I think reality speaks for itself.
"If .Net and IIS were really so brilliant with such a low TCO, why is it so infrequently chosen by big web services over other solutions"
According to Netcraft, 49% of websites now run IIS, and 10% of the 1 million busiest sites run IIS.
"10% of the 1 million busiest sites run IIS"
Exactly - only one in ten popular websites use it (I'd say much less so for the really big-tier platforms), and that's been on a slow but steady decline for a long time now. Not a very promising selling point.
"That would be typical Microsoft - still stuck in their NIH ways"
.Net and IIS are certainly relatively easy to build and maintain - and are proven to scale. So the question becomes really around the TCO - which is partly situation and use dependent.
When you own the software and OS in question and are setup to write, deploy and support it, it's going to be a no brainer that it will be a lower TCO...
"When you own the software and OS in question and are setup to write, deploy and support it, it's going to be a no brainer that it will be a lower TCO..."
Correct, but that doesn't translate to customers (i.e. everyone else out there) who would have to pay for it. So I'm not seeing anything convincing here at all.
Reminds me of the ending theme for the movie "The Blob" back from the late 50's (I think)
Burt Bacharach classic jazz-rock!
"*pop* - Beware of the Blob, it creeps, and leaps, ..."
once Micro-shaft re-organizes it's entire, uh, organization so that it's a single monolithic absorbing entity, that is.
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>Although the discounts for an EA would be higher than for a month-to-month pricing scheme based on consumption, going with a consumption-based model might work out better for customers with workloads that are more dynamic than static, according to one source.
Ah, the mythical dynamic work-load.
Weasel-words.
Who are these people and what percentage of MS customer-base are they?
I've never worked in an organisation which spins down *production* Windows systems because it doesn't need them at the moment. Maybe there are some, I've just never met them.
Test (as in "pilot") systems, fair enough - its easier to kill and rebuild than to modify them, but that generally isn't a major cost and where it is a cost, it is an MS-dumb-license-model cost.
Typical marketing: make a problem, then sell the solution.
I could have written this article 3 months ago. Everyone knows the change is coming, virtually nobody knows what the change is exactly. It's more than just a salesforce re-org, this is supposedly the most serious every re-org. Nobody knows exact job losses as there will be large numbers of redundant positions but also new positions, and people will be able to apply for those roles.
Those who do know the real detail are under strict NDA, and the numbers of these people are seriously limited. For an organisation with a normally very effective grapevine, the lock-down that has occurred with this re-org is quite impressive. The changes will be large, but until you actually have some kind of detail, what's the point of this article?
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