Hundreds of Microsoft Employees Could Be Target of Layoffs

Microsoft (News - Alert) is reportedly moving ahead with rumored layoffs this month - though the numbers are expected to be in the hundreds and not even come close to the over 5,000 layoffs the company had in 2009.

Microsoft's Central Marketing Group, Enterprise Partner Group, the SharePoint/Office team and the search/advertising teams are among the business units to make cuts, according to news reports.

"Most of the cuts I've heard about have been in the marketing/sales organizations," according to Mary-Jo Foley, writing for ZDNet.

The layoffs are apparently not the result of the company's ill-fated experience with Kin phones. Kin phones were sold from April through June, 2010 through Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless. Microsoft announced the discontinuation of the Kins on June 30, 2010. Foley said that Microsoft was reportedly moving many of the Kin developers to the Windows Phone (News - Alert) 7 team.

In addition, there were many unofficial blog postings this week that layoff notices were part of the realignment Microsoft routinely makes at the beginning of its fiscal year.

The layoffs were not limited to Microsoft's Redmond Washington headquarters but were expected in different locations.

Microsoft had almost 89,000 employees as of June.

As of early this week, Microsoft had not issued a public statement about possible layoffs.

However, an IDG online publication in Australia, ARN, this week quoted an unnamed Microsoft representative from Australia that, 'Microsoft believes its future business is firmly centered on the cloud and we are rebalancing the organization globally in order to create a number of new cloud specific roles across the business. We have identified roles that we will not be continuing with as part of our organizational structure as we create capacity for roles more aligned to this core cloud focus. It is part of a global change instituted by Microsoft world-wide."

In a related matter, Microsoft in the fall will introduce Windows Phone 7, the new operating system for mobile devices.