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Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It is worth understanding that this is "different" than... all the other layoffs in tech at this point.
MS acquired ABK. Any acquisition almost always leads to "downsizing". At a high level: ABK would have had their own payroll department. Now they go through MS payroll. Why do you need an entire department whose job is now superfluous? Obviously this gets a LOT more complex with developers and the like (as well as local management) but that is the mindset.
But... holy fucking shit that is a lot of people getting laid off at one of the worst times to be unemployed in "tech" in the past decade.
Also considering the apparent toxicity of certain Blizzard employees it's probably a good opportunity to "purge" the Kotic gang and his following.
So that's a dozen people. 1900 is more than a hundred times that. (#mathFTW)
These cuts will seriously hurt product.
Also, I sense my less-than-new windows version will be unsupported; and I only had it so the one game ran better.
Blizzard Products were polished turds.
They need a huge cultural shift and I'm all for it.
Oh it's ok since competition is getting killed too. See you soon at the bottom of the barrel.