Back in May, Microsoft announced that it will be laying off 1,850 employees as the company moves away from the smartphone market. That isn’t the end of the cut it seems as Microsoft’s annual report that was released on Thursday shows that the company is aiming to cut an additional 2,850 jobs as the company looks to end its smartphone effort, as well as restructure its sales force.
With the addition of 2,850 employees being laid off, Microsoft has essentially released its hold on Nokia, a company that it acquired back in April of 2014 for USD7.2 billion. With Windows phone being unable to break into the smartphone market, with Windows phones accounting for only one percent of the global smartphone market in the first quarter of 2016, it seems that Microsoft has decided to move away from creating smartphones altogether.
Microsoft may be abandoning the hardware market, but that doesn’t mean that the company is leaving the smartphone market altogether. Current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s strategy for the smartphone market has been to make Microsoft’s technology available on both iOS and Android. One such example of this strategy is the release of Pix yesterday for the iOS.