Gates took the money with him

Slate has an article by Alison Griswold about bad times at Microsoft:

Microsoft announced its biggest round of layoffs in its history. As many as eighteen thousand employees— or up to fourteen percent of Microsoft's workforce— are on the line to lose their jobs. More than twelve thousand of those cuts are expected to come from the Nokia mobile phone business, an unpopular investment made by former chief executive Steve Ballmer last year. It's the first major step by current CEO Satya Nadella (photo) toward turning the lagging tech corporation around.
Setting aside the cuts being made to Nokia staff, some fifty-five hundred people are expected to lose their jobs from Microsoft. That's roughly on par with the fifty-eight hundred employees that Microsoft axed in the wake of the financial crisis. The Wall Street Journal reports that some were even hoping for a more drastic move from Nadella in reshaping the company's sprawling operations. That said, eighteen thousand is a lot, especially in the technology industry. According to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Microsoft's layoff announcement is the fourth-biggest at a US-based firm since it began tracking such things in 1989:

IBM: 60,000 employees in July of 1993)
Hewlett-Packard: 27,000 employees in May of 2012
Hewlett-Packard: 24,600 employees in September of 2008
Microsoft: 18,000 employees in July of 2014

Fifth on that list is Hewlett-Packard again, which announced that it would cut somewhere between 11,000 and 16,000 employees in May of 2014. When you add in all industries, Microsoft's cuts aren't all that bad— they're dwarfed by reductions implemented at banks, automakers, and in the US Postal Service. But for a tech industry not accustomed to mass layoffs (except at Hewlett-Packard, it would seem) trimming eighteen thousand employees is a significant step.

Rico says he's sorry for all those underlings who took it in the head...