Tag: Windows Phone

The smartphone division of the company is experiencing a staggering number of job losses.

Microsoft has made an unhappy mobile technology news announcement of 3,000 upcoming job losses. The majority of the lay-offs are the result of the astounding failure of the Nokia deal and the redundancies it created.

The affected employees will be losing their positions over the next year within that division.

The Microsoft smartphone hardware business and global sales division will experience a massive reduction in size. Moreover, this is only the latest bad mobile technology news the company has issued this year. Back in May, it confirmed that its mobile branch would be downsizing by 1,850 jobs. At that time, Terry Myerson, the vice president of Windows and device said “we’re scaling back, but we’re not out!”

This all stems from the mobile technology news when Microsoft bought the devices and services business at Nokia.

The acquisition occurred in 2013. Microsoft made the purchase for $7.1 billion (€5.4 billion). Not only did it buy the devices and business, but it also took in all the associated problems. As it unfolded, it became one of the most disastrous tech acquisitions in history.

Three months after the acquisition closed, Microsoft eliminated 18,000 positions. The majority were from the phone hardware division. This mainly removed employees who had become a part of Microsoft by way of the Nokia buy-out. One year after that point, Microsoft wrote off $7 billion and laid off 7,800 more employees.

This downward spiral continued into May when the vast majority of the feature phone business was sold at a tiny fraction of its purchase price and additional 1,850 jobs were lost.

Now, the mobile technology news trend continues at Microsoft. In the elimination of redundancies, the company is slashing 2,850 jobs. Within a U.S. regulatory filing, the software giant explained: “we periodically evaluate how to best deploy the company’s resources.” Microsoft also said the restructuring would primarily affect the smartphone hardware business and global sales. These latest position eliminations will be in addition to those announced in May and will not include those figures in their total.

The applications are designed for users of Window phones and other mobile devices based on the platform.

Last Friday, a long awaited announcement about Microsoft Office was finally made, to unveil the suite of apps that would be available in a format that was touchscreen friendly, to make it possible for the users of mobile devices to actually use the applications with greater ease.

The suite is meant for users of Windows phone and includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The touchscreen compatible Microsoft Office apps version will not only make it possible for users of Windows Phone based devices to work on documents within those programs, but it is also meant to make it possible for those docs to transfer from one type of device to another with greater ease. The company has called them its Office Universal apps and the test versions have already become available. That said, it has also announced that the full versions of these mobile apps will become available before the end of April.

This new touchscreen version of Microsoft Office apps is an announcement that many users have awaited for months.

Pretty much everyone knew that these mobile apps were on their way, but the main question was when they would actually become available for users of Windows phone and tablet devices. There have already been similar Office apps launched that are touchscreen friendly and that have been released by Microsoft for users of tablets running on Android from Google, and on Apple’s iPhones and iPads. This was quite the step away from the traditions of the company and the mobile technology industry, for that matter.

The idea behind that strategy was that those rival platforms are the most popular at the moment and are currently dominating the mobile computing industry. Therefore, they were catering to a market that was much larger and more lucrative for its Office products than its own platform of Windows for smartphones and tablets.

The basic functions of the Microsoft Office apps will be available to everyone for free, but users will need to subscribe to Office 365 (a paid Cloud based service) in order to obtain advanced editing features.