Windows 7 Serial Are there more layoffs in Microso

1 of the concerns that no analyst asked directly during Microsoft;s post-FY09 Q4 earnings contact this week was 1 fairly much on Microsoft personnel; minds: Will Microsoft cut a lot more jobs being a approach to improve its numbers for the following calendar quarter or two?Microsoft announced programs to cut five,Office 2010 Home And Student,000 work opportunities in January and made these cuts within the very first 50 percent of calendar 2009.The closest any Wall Street analyst got to asking that query (a minimum of that I heard) was when Brad Reback from Oppenheimer & Co. asked Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell about the expense side of Microsoft;s equation for the rest of the year. According to a transcript of the simply call, Liddell responded:“Yes, certainly for this fiscal year, I don’t see any potential for us to drastically vary from the numbers that I gave you. The only reason why it would would be something outside our control, like foreign exchange, so some of our expenses are outside the U.S., if we saw a significant change within the FX rate, then I can’t influence that. And things like some of our volume related expenses, so if we saw a really strong pick-up in some of our enterprise sales, some of our revenue driven expenses might boost.“But in terms of things, which is the great bulk of the expenses which are totally within our control, I don’t see any potential for us to [inaudible] this year.”That inaudible clause, according to my notes,Windows 7 Serial, was “I don;t see any potential for us to decrease our expenses for the rest of this year.”So does all that mumbo-jumbo translate to no far more layoffs? Probably — a minimum of for the rest of this calendar year. But not definitively….Brent Hill, an analyst with Citi Software noted that Microsoft can never say never to that question. (And CEO Steve Ballmer produced that abundantly clear in a May e-mail to the troops,Windows 7 Home Premium, where he refused to rule out much more cuts inside the future.)However, with that caveat, Hill added,Windows 7 License, “I don;t think extra layoffs are coming.”Like a number of Wall Street analysts who watch Microsoft, Hill said he believed Microsoft needed to trim its ranks to get its costs down.“They should have taken a deeper reduce than they did — like the rest of their peer group (other tech vendors) did” Hill told me yesterday.There;s been lots of layoff speculation on the anonymous Microsoft employee blog Mini-Microsoft, particularly leading up to and right after Microsoft;s dismal earnings announcement. (It;s important to remember that on Mini-Microsoft, it;s hard to separate informed rumors from competitors and others attempting to whip Microsoft employees into a frenzy.)There have been some fairly credible rumors I;ve heard about the Windows client unit shedding extra employees now that Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing. Traditionally, at the end of each Windows cycle,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus, some staff decide to move to other positions inside Microsoft and/or leave the company outright before the next Windows release cycle kicks into high gear.I asked Microsoft for comment this week as to whether there will be further proactive belt-tightening by the Windows client group — or as Mini;s author, “Who Da;Punk” calls it, being “Sinofsky;d” (a reference to Windows President Steven Sinofsky;s house-cleaning and reorg;ing of the Windows unit when he became the new sherriff a few years ago).I was told that there was nothing within the works as of this week. A spokesperson said that Microsoft did make a couple of organizational tweaks within Windows when the company introduced the promotion of Sinofsky to president, but that nothing a lot more was happening at the moment.