Microsoft's Operating Systems Group Head Terry Myerson's Internal Memo Regarding Layoffs Leaked

Yesterday, we reported that apart from the 12,500 former Nokia employees who will leave Microsoft, another 5,500 Microsoft employees will also be shown the door. As per the sources of Mary Jo Foley, every other team from legal to Xbox is affected by this move. It is also reported that the newly formed Operating Systems Group which is responsible for the development of Windows will be affected immediately. Also, Terry Myerson is now shaking up the functional structure of Windows team which was program management/development/software testing structure since Sinofsky’s days. The following is the internal memo sent by Terry Myerson to his group,

Re: Focusing our team
Team,

As Satya shared last week, and we’ve been discussing for almost a year, we are making broad changes in how we engineer products. Thus, today we are restructuring some parts of our team in three areas: consolidating some of our geographically distributed teams, cancelling some projects to increase investment on higher priorities, and changing the ratio of people working across disciplines as part of our new engineering process. For individuals in Redmond whose jobs are impacted, a leader within their organization will have reached out by 11:30 AM PDT today; timing outside of Redmond will vary.

This change is so incredibly hard. People whose jobs are impacted by these changes are our colleagues and friends. The company is offering support, services and assistance during this transition in a number of ways. For those of you whose jobs are impacted by this, I want to thank you for your contribution to Microsoft and our customers, and wish you the best.

It will take time for all of us to adjust to today’s announcement, but we can now move forward knowing that we have completed the OSG-wide restructuring in the US today; the process outside the US will be completed according to local law and practices.

-Terry

The main thing to note is he was mentioning  about cancelling some projects to increase investment on higher priorities. What are those projects? Any specific OS related team fired? We will come to know in the coming days.

Source: ZDNet