Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs

Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by tptacek on Thursday July 17, 2014 @11:04AM (#8047908)

Cisco has a very different M&A strategy than Google. They add product lines through acquisition, in preference to building internally (if you're on a Cisco team and you're ever given an MRD for a product, the joke goes, quit and start a company to do it instead). As often as not, Google acquires companies to absorb the people. Google typically buys much smaller companies, and more selectively.

I would be very surprised to discover that Google has acquired close to as many headcount as Cisco has. But I don't want to do the research work either. :)

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Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by dave1619 on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:38PM (#8048958)

"I would be very surprised to discover that Google has acquired close to as many headcount as Cisco has. But I don't want to do the research work either. :)"

In 2012 Google acquired Motorola Mobility with it's 20,000 employees.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2148219/Googl...

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Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by jychang on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:50PM (#8049028)

I would argue that Google and Motorola never "merged".

Google just bought out the patents of Motorola and dumped the company away to Lenovo afterwards. There was no merging, no redundant employee elimination process, like in other mergers.

Plus, this number is obviously a large outlier. An actual stats person would just go calculate the figures with the outlier removed- Cisco probably made much larger acquisitions, employee count-wise, than Google in that case.

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Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by ersii on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:05PM (#8048746)

What does "MRD" stand for? I've been searching for a definition but I can't seem to find any, that makes sense in this context.

Given the context, I guess it's some kind of product development order?

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Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by pionar on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:54PM (#8049059)

Market Research (or Requirements) Document

It's a document that's usually produced by a product management group in a company that outlines (very vague, almost laughably so) the "market requirements" - what users will want/need - for a given feature or set of features.

This is usually handed to developers/designers to come up with a "High Level Design" (HLD) that gives the "how" to the MRD's "what".

It's usually only seen in larger software companies.

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Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by tptacek on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:55PM (#8049074)

It'd be more accurate to say that MRDs are an artifact of waterfall design. Waterfall is out of fashion, and so small companies tend not to use it, but if you're shipping hardware (like Cisco does) it's often more natural than agile.

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Re:Microsoft Looks to Cut Up to 18,000 Jobs by tptacek on Thursday July 17, 2014 @01:14PM (#8048812)

Marketing requirements document; the set of features for the next release of a product.

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