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Microsoft's Nokia deal: Layoffs look inevitable   ( read original ) BANGALORE: Microsoft and Nokia's India operations are among the biggest outside their home countries, and it looks like a certain number of redundancies and consequent layoffs are inevitable. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's email to Microsoft employees on the Nokia deal said the companies would integrate all global marketing and have a unified brand and advertising strategy. It said that finance, legal, HR, communications, evangelism, customer care and business development would integrate functionally at Microsoft. ICM/IT will also integrate functionally for traditional IT roles, it said. Such integration in most cases implies redundancies. Nokia has 9,000 employees in India, almost a tenth of its global workforce. Microsoft has 6,000 employees here, out of its global strength of 97,000. It's unlikely that there will be much overlap at the engineering, support and R&D lev...

Microsoft ditching points for Xbox Live with next system update  ( original article ) Earlier this year, Microsoft had made its intentions of  phasing out the wretched Points system  on Xbox Live rather clear, but what it didn’t outline was the timeline. Larry Hryb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live, has just announced that come the next system update, the MS Points will be eliminated. Microsoft had said earlier this year during the  announcement of the Xbox One  that the company will also be doing away with the wretched MS Points system, which had become the cause of frustration for many gamers. The issue was not just with the arbitrary conversion of real money to Points, but also when translating different currencies into Points. Since Points could only be bought in USD equivalents, international customers ended up paying more for their Points than the US counterparts due to various currency conversion factors. Microsoft plans on implementin...

Former Microsoft VP thought dead after his plane crashes into Connecticut homes Bill Henningsgaard, a former sales VP at the computing giant, is presumed dead, along with his 17-year-old son and two younger children, after his plane crashes into two homes while approaching an airport.( Read the original post here ) A former Microsoft executive, along with his 17-year-old son and two younger children, are presumed dead after the man's small plane crashed into two Connecticut homes Friday. Bill Henningsgaard, 54, held various marketing and sales positions at the computing giant -- including vice president of sales for the western United States, Australia, and New Zealand -- before leaving in the early 2000s to focus on philanthropy. He was on a trip to explore college options with his son when his plane went down while approaching Connecticut's Tweed New Haven airport. The cause of the crash has not yet been determined. An East Haven Fire Department official  told  ...