On: Amid layoffs, Microsofties reveal further turmoil ...

[city41]

According to Wikipedia, Apple has 34k employees. Microsoft has over 100k. Maybe at that scale, 34k and 100k aren't very different, or maybe that's like night and day.

[Tichy → city41]

34K still seems a lot, but how many are really involved in developing the core products? A lot of them would probably be sales people etc?

Maybe MS would do better with 34K than 100K people...

[jorgeortiz85 → Tichy]

Yeah, Apple probably has a lot of retail employees for their Apple Stores.

[city41 → Tichy]

A lot of people have that opinion. Such as the Mini-Microsoft blog: http://minimsft.blogspot.com/, which is supposedly ran by an MS employee.

[kalid → Tichy]

Yes, and how many work in their retail stores (not sure if that's included). Every Apple store I've been to seems to have a 1:1 customer to employee ratio.

[rao → city41]

The range of products offered by Microsoft is huge. Multiple versions of OS, Office, VS and various websites.

[rbanffy → rao]

They should slash the product line. They won't because of the lock-in loops. If they cease to offer one product line, the lock-in loop where it participates gets broken.