Deep cuts at Microsoft

What do you do when you are an aging PC-based company in an era dominated by mobile, cloud, and Internet companies? For 39-year-old Microsoft, the only way to compete with the Amazons and Googles of the world is to trim the fat; and in this case, it's a lot of fat.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has initiated one of the largest layoffs in tech history on July 17, according to a report published in Reuters. The company plans to cut a staggering 18,000 jobs as it attempts to re-cast itself as a cloud and mobile company. Microsoft's recently-acquired Nokia device and services unit will be the hardest hit, with 12,500 projected layoffs. That represents about half of Nokia’s total workforce.

In a letter distributed to Microsoft employees, Nadella wrote, "We are moving now to start reducing the first 13,000 positions, and the vast majority of employees whose jobs will be eliminated will be notified over the next six months."

Not surprisingly, Nadella’s approval rating among current and former Microsoft employees fell by 24 percent following the announcement.

Listening: the key to a good relationship

It turns out that listening is just as important to customer relationships as it is in the romantic variety. In fact, this might be the best place to start for boosting the customer experience. Customer care metrics are closely tied to how well a company remembers a customer’s history, according to a new survey from [24]7. A whopping 70 percent of respondents stated that customer service was impersonal and annoying because service providers seemed to forget prior conversations.

The survey also illuminated the importance of listening across multiple channels, with 91 percent of customers using at least two channels to interact with their service provider.

"Today's consumers live in an omnichannel world and expect companies to use data to know their situation, anticipate what they need, and resolve their issues effortlessly to give them an amazing experience," said P.V. Kannan, co-founder and CEO of [24]7. "Since consumers use multiple channels to complete a task, companies must maintain context across channels as if the consumer were interacting in a single digital channel."

Network evolution in the limelight

Speed limits were made to be broken, and data speed limits are being shattered left and right. Look out fiber: On July 9, Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs took traditional copper telephone lines to speeds that are unheard of - 10 Gbps - and demonstrated symmetrical transmission over copper. The same day, in Turkey, Turkcell, Ericsson, and Qualcomm took 3G speeds to new levels with 3-Carrier HSDPA technology. Earlier, in June, SK Telecom and Nokia broke their own LTE speed record with 3.78 Gbps throughput. They achieved this feat by aggregating 10 spectrum frequencies in both TDD and FDD LTE, creating a massive 200 MHz of bandwidth.

It’s not just speed that made headlines, however. LTE Broadcast (LTE-B), a technology Pipeline profiled last month, is beginning to take shape. Nokia Networks is trialing the technology to broadcast national television.

“Today, when watching videos over a mobile network, the content is individually streamed to each user. With LTE Broadcast the same signal is received by many users at the same time, resulting in more efficient capacity and spectrum use,” said Hossein Moiin, chief technology officer, Nokia Networks. “Spectrum doesn’t need to be dedicated to either broadcast or broadband, but can be used flexibly for both according to users’ needs. We believe that LTE Broadcast is a technology well suited to distribute TV and broadcast services and will help us expand the benefits of mobile internet to everyone while evolving the TV viewing experience."