After all the reports and rumours that have been doing the rounds in the last few days, American multinational technology company Microsoft has finally confirmed that it is set for a corporate rejig, which will witness about 3,000 jobs being cut.
The Redmond-based firm began sending out layoff notices on Thursday but declined to reveal the exact details of the move. Most of the job cuts are likely to affect the firm's sales and marketing staff based out of the US.
"Microsoft is implementing changes to better serve our customers and partners," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a statement, according to Tech Crunch. "Today, we are taking steps to notify some employees that their jobs are under consideration or that their positions will be eliminated. 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."
It had earlier been said that the layoff process was likely to begin on Thursday, July 6, and numerous Microsoft employees are said to have discussed this on anonymous chat app Blind.
Conference rooms had reportedly been booked and numerous employees were asked to meet their managers for about 15-minute discussions, reported Business Insider. Many employees believed that they will not be laid off but will instead be asked to move to another department.
The exact intention behind the rejig is yet to be known, but GeekWire is said to have got hold of a document, which it indicated were excerpts from the Microsoft memo, and it says that this is a part of the company's plans to help its customers with "digital transformations."
Many reports have also said that Microsoft now intends to focus on cloud-services product, Azure, whose sales grew 93% in the last quarter. "While Amazon has become a bigger competitor in the space, Microsoft's restructuring is to pivot to software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure," a CNBC report said.
