I've been following this since mid-december, but I did not want to blog about it pre-xmas\new year as it's a slug of bad news no MS employees wants to see.

However, it's now internally (but not publically) been announced according to several reports on the web (none of which are can be seen as authorative) that 17% (15K) of staff are going to get their marching orders come 15th of Jan 2009.

It's just unbelievable that they need to scale down the work-force so drastically. My sincerest thoughts go out to the folks I know in Microsoft EMEA, and I hope not a single one of them gets the chop.

And during this cut-back I hope they don't throw the baby out with the water as they say!

Here's a link to news source on the subject

Read the complete post at http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/r0b/archive/2009/01/02/rumour-no-more-microsoft-intending-to-lay-off-17k-of-employees.aspx