You know you’re in trouble when two of the biggest companies in digital media and technology, Ebay and Microsoft announce job cuts and profit losses in the same week.
As reported by New Media Age, the seemingly untouchable giant of computing, and the darling of the internet commerce industry both showed us exactly how hard this recession is hitting.
Microsoft announced today that they are to cut 5% of their entire workforce over the next 18 months due to instability and a slow down in tech spend. Although only 60 look to be going in the UK, in worldwide terms it will be around 5,000 employees. This came on the back of Ebay announcing that for the first time since launching in 1995 quarterly revenues were to drop year on year.
Now to me, at least for a company like Microsoft, this makes sense. With a recession as deep as this one looks to be, technology buys were always going to suffer over the short to medium term. Even so, when such a huge name that has seemingly been immune to the vagueries of the world economy get’s hit this hard you know things are looking grim.
And Ebay’s losses make this situation look a whole lot worse. You would have thought that this would be a perfect time for Ebay to build even further on it’s position with people feeling the pinch and needing to offload a few unwanted presents. But I guess it doesn’t matter how many people have second hand Fender’s to sell and Vivienne Westwood skirts to flog if the buyers just don’t have the cash.
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