Earlier this week Microsoft employees received an email that the company was making sweeping changes to its salesforce. Since then, many of them have been on the anonymous chat app Blind to say that they’ve been asked to attend 15-minute meetings with their bosses, and that conference rooms are all booked.
The administrators of Blind say that some 25,000 Microsoft employees do use their website. To access it, the person must be a verified employee of the company they’ve registered under, so that adds some credence to the reports.
To be clear, Microsoft has not officially mentioned a round of layoffs, and some of the employees who mentioned the appointments simply feel they may be transferred to different units. The original report of “thousands” of layoffs came from TechCrunch.
The gist of it seems to be that Microsoft is re-aligning its salesforce to put more focus on its enterprise and cloud businesses. That does make sense, since that’s where Microsoft’s product development focus has been of late. With 114,000 people on its payrolls (2016 data), Microsoft does have a sizable salesforce.
It must be kept in mind that Microsoft is moving from a product-centric portfolio to a services-based one. Most of its software products already have cloud-served equivalents, and standalone software has mostly become the legacy part of Microsoft’s business.
As such, even if there aren’t any significant layoffs starting today, there’s going to be a major upheaval within the company’s sales teams. Reassignments will be made, severance offers will be floated, people will get upset and a lot will happen at Microsoft’s offices all over the world. But in the end, the company will hopefully be aligned to its new goals in cloud and enterprise.
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