Redmond Planning First Layoffs in Microsoft History — 15,000 Jobs at Risk

You know things are bad when the world’s richest near-monopoly is planning to cut jobs.

The world’s top software firm, Microsoft, is planning a massive reduction in its workforce, and up to 15,000 jobs may be cut this month. The cuts will be the first wide scale layoffs in the Redmond, Washington-based company’s 32-year history.

Speculation about job cuts was triggered by a report on Fudzilla, a technology blog site, which reported that employees were told that the company was preparing for major layoffs from its global operations on January 15th.

Brokerage firm Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Brad Reback asked Microsoft to cut its workforce by 10%, or about 9,100 employees. Such a layoff exercise “would be a healthy move for the company”, Reback said.

Microsoft had close to 91,000 employees on its payroll at end of Q3.

News of job losses comes after the company was forced to apologize for an embarrassing flaw in its Zune digital music player. A bug in the device’s internal clock in the original 30-gigabyte version failed to cope with the last day of the leap year, and thousands of owners were left with a frozen screen on December 31st.