Microsoft reveals plans to lay off 18K workers
Microsoft reveals plans to lay off 18K workers
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Microsoft announced the biggest layoffs in its 39-year history Thursday, outlining plans to cut 18,000 jobs in a move that marked the CEO’s sharpest pivot yet away from his predecessor’s drive for the company to make its own devices.
Although some cuts had been expected ever since Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile-device unit, the number amounted to 14 percent of the Microsoft workforce — about twice what analysts had estimated.
The cuts will include some 12,500 jobs associated with the Nokia unit — nearly half of the 28,000 employees Microsoft brought on board in April through the acquisition.
When the cuts are complete, the company will still have about 10,000 more employees than before the Nokia acquisition, with an overall headcount of 109,000.
In a public email to employees, CEO Satya Nadella said the changes were needed for the company to “become more agile and move faster.” The move also pushes Nokia to focus solely on the Windows Phone operating system.
Nadella is clearly backing away from former CEO Steve Ballmer’s strategy of getting Microsoft to make its own smartphones and tablets.
“He’s making a pretty serious game-changing strategy move away from hardware,” said Michael Turits, managing director of equity research for financial services company Raymond James &Associates.
Nadella indicated that Microsoft will largely abandon low-price Nokia Asha phones — which work on their own non-Windows operating system — and reverse a strategically questionable move by Nokia in February to launch a line of phones called “X” that supported rival Google Inc.’s Android platform.
Senators call on GM CEO to fire top lawyer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers demanded General Motors fire its chief lawyer and do more to help crash victims as a Senate subcommittee delved deeper into GM’s mishandling of the recall of small cars with defective ignition switches.
Thursday’s grilling was GM’s fourth appearance before Congress, but senators aren’t done with their investigation. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who chairs the subcommittee, said she will hold a hearing in the next few weeks to ask government safety regulators about their role in the recall.
GM has admitted that it knew about the faulty switches for more than a decade before recalling the cars. The ignition switches can slip out of the “run” position, causing the engines to stall and shutting off power to the air bags. It took years for GM engineers to connect the switch problem to the failure of the air bags to deploy.
GM recalled 2.6 million small cars beginning in February. That recall prompted an unprecedented safety review within the company, which has since issued 54 separate recalls for 29 million vehicles.
McCaskill praised GM CEO Mary Barra, saying she has “confronted the problem head on and the corporate culture that caused it.”
But McCaskill also put Barra on the spot, telling the CEO she should have fired GM’s corporate counsel, Michael Millikin, based on the conclusions of an internal report by outside attorney Anton Valukas. Barra, with Millikin sitting beside her, defended him as a man of “tremendously high integrity.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said GM needs to be more transparent and assume more responsibility. He called for the public release of all of the documents given to Valukas and the unsealing of previous lawsuit settlements.
Elaine Stritch mourned as feisty, funny broad
NEW YORK (AP) — Elaine Stritch was more than a Broadway actress. She was a New York institution, strolling around in a fur coat, pork pie hat or oversized sunglasses. She often wore shorts and ties, or just black stockings and a white flowing shirt. Her weapon of choice was the zinger.
“I like anything I don’t know about,” she said in a 2010 interview. “And I don’t like most of the things I do.” She also offered this: “The most horrible line in the English language for me is, ‘God, you haven’t changed a bit.’”
Stritch, who became a sort of shorthand for acting longevity since she made her Broadway debut in “Loco” in 1946, died Thursday at 89 in her home state of Michigan — far from her adopted home of New York and her former longtime home and stage at the Carlyle Hotel. But Broadway and New York immediately sent their love.
Liza Minnelli remembered her as “a true trail blazer. Her talent and spunk will be greatly missed by so many of us.” Lena Dunham said on Twitter: “May your heaven be a booze-soaked, no-pants solo show at the Carlyle.” Broadway’s marquees were to dim in her memory today.
Although Stritch appeared in movies and on television, garnering three Emmys and finding new fans as Alec Baldwin’s mother on “30 Rock,” she was best known for her stage work, particularly in her candid one-woman memoir, “Elaine Stritch: At Liberty.”