layoffs

Microsoft on Tuesday notified more than 3,000 workers that it was eliminating their jobs.

The software maker said in January that it would cut up to 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months. It made 1,400 cuts at the time. With the second wave of notifications on Tuesday, Microsoft has cut nearly all 5,000 jobs already.

Although it didn't announce further layoffs, the fact that the company has already made nearly all the reductions under the January plan means further job actions will have to come under a new round of cuts. In a memo to Microsoft workers, … Read more

Market research firm IDC on Friday said it is cutting 82 workers in the United States, or 5 percent of its worldwide staff "due to the impact of the economic recession."

The Framingham, Mass.-based company said that the cuts include 26 research analysts.

"IDC will continue to have more than 1,000 research analysts worldwide which is more than any other technology market intelligence and advisory company," IDC said in a statement. The firm added that it still has more analysts than it did a year ago, noting that it hired 50 new analysts in … Read more

Sony Ericsson plans to lay off a further 2,000 employees in the wake of deeper quarterly financial losses.

The staff cuts, announced on Friday, add to the 2,000 cuts the handset maker outlined in July. They came the same day that Sony Ericsson reported its first-quarter earnings results, which showed that the company had a pretax loss of 358 million euros ($467 million) for the first three months of 2009. The company's earnings slipped into the red in the third quarter of 2008, and its losses have deepened ever since.

"As expected, the first quarter of … Read more

Updated 7:55 a.m. PDT with a detail about selling HotJobs.

Yahoo is rumored to be planning to announce more layoffs next week, its third round of cuts in a little more than a year, according to a report Tuesday in The New York Times.

The layoffs could affect hundreds of employees and could be announced as early as April 21 when the embattled search pioneer announces its first-quarter financial results, according to the report.

Yahoo representatives declined to comment on the report.

The report also said Yahoo has been trying to sell off its HotJobs job listing classified-ad … Read more

With the economy in the tank, Microsoft has decided not to let its workers follow. The software maker has confirmed it has canceled plans to have a bar as part of an expansion of its Redmond campus.

The pub, which had been planned for more than a year, was to be part of a collection of restaurants and stores that were due to open next week as part of the company's new headquarters for its Entertainment and Devices unit. Spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed the company recently decided to pull the plug.

"We had to take another look at … Read more

Motorola announced plans Monday to record $229 million in charges related to layoffs during the first quarter.

In a filing with the SEC, Motorola said that it will have cut 5,600 employees in the first quarter, completing the 7,000 layoffs it has announced since October of 2008. In exchange for letting those employees go, Motorola will have to pay them $216 million as well as record an additional $13 million in charges related to the exit of certain businesses.

Motorola has a goal for reducing its 2009 annual costs by $1.5 billion. The company's handset division … Read more

For the second time in five months, Wired.com, the Internet arm of Wired magazine, has trimmed its staff.

According to a Twitter post from Evan Hansen, the Web site's editor in chief, the company laid off 3 out of 25 full-time staffers or 12 percent of its workforce.

"Reports of Wired.com 'gutting' greatly exaggerated," Hansen wrote on Twitter, presumably referring to published reports about Wired.com's layoffs. "We cut three staff, five contractors, (and) still have 45 people working for us overall."

Among those who lost their jobs was Eliot Van Buskirk, … Read more

Software services in the U.S. helped temper the overall sequential decline in technology jobs during the fourth quarter, allowing the industry to minimize jobs losses compared to the private sector, according to a TechAmerica report released late Monday.

Tech jobs, overall, dipped 0.6 percent, or by 38,000 positions, sequentially in the fourth quarter, while U.S. private sector jobs declined 1.3 percent during the same period, according to TechAmerica, a technology advocacy trade group.

"The tech sector weathered the storm longer and stronger than other parts of the economy," Phil Bond, TechAmerica president, said … Read more

Google is eliminating about 200 sales and marketing jobs, the company said in a blog post Thursday, blaming the move on overlapping areas and overhiring during a more optimistic time.

"Today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of global sales and business development, in the blog post. "We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and … Read more