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Software giant reportedly plans to put more focus on selling cloud services in bid to catch Amazon.
Microsoft plans to cut jobs as part of a sweeping reorganisation of its global sales force.
Sources cited by Bloomberg on Saturday said the move could be announced this week, and will affect the software giant’s worldwide commercial division and the global sales and marketing group.
According to the report, Microsoft wants to concentrate more resources on selling cloud services hosted in its data centres, rather than selling software used on desktop PCs and on company-owned servers.
It is hoped that this change in emphasis will help the company catch cloud services giant Amazon.
Bloomberg’s sources said the reorganisation represents the biggest change to Microsoft’s sales force in years, and will also affect marketing strategies in several countries.
Redundancies have become something of an unwelcome annual tradition for Microsoft at this time of year.
If an announcement is indeed made this week, the latest round of job cuts will kick off immediately after the culmination of the last one, which was detailed in May 2016, and affected what little was left of Microsoft’s Nokia handsets business.
Less than a year before that, in July 2015, it was announced that 7,800 jobs at Nokia would be axed. That came 12 months after Microsoft made its biggest ever round of redundancies, culling 18,000 positions.
