Microsoft's Layoff Strategy Still in Motion

Microsoft is intent on fulfilling its promise to lay off 18,000 employees, or 14% of its workforce. Reports on Sunday say that the software company took last week to silently eliminate additional positions. The hatchet didn't fall on thousands as before, but only a few hundred.

The restructuring plan was announced last July by new CEO, Satya Nadella. The first round of cuts were focused primarily on jobs part of the Nokia phone acquisition and resulted in the bulk of the layoffs. Subsequent layoffs, carried out in September and October, were smaller, but hit a number of areas within Microsoft including Microsoft's Operating Systems Group, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft Research, Xbox, MSN and other engineering and marketing positions.

The latest round of layoffs is intended to "remove role overlap, optimize activities and functions, align disciplines with the rest of Microsoft, and, perhaps most importantly, reshape IT for the skills we need to transform," Microsoft's CIO, Jim DuBois, stated.

This is expected to be the last round of broad cuts.