- Microsoft lays off a team dedicated to reinventing consumer appeal.
- Modern Life Experiences employees have 60 days to seek a new job or leave the company.
- The company offered employees one week of severance pay for every six months they worked at Microsoft.
Microsoft is laying off a team dedicated to rebuilding its consumer appeal and asking employees on its “Modern Life Experiences” team to find another position at the company within 60 days, according to two people familiar with the change. instructed him to retire.
According to an employee with indirect knowledge of the plan, Microsoft is offering employees one week’s severance pay for every six months of work, and employees will continue to receive annual bonuses in September. I will receive it. The employee estimated the size of the team at 200. Microsoft did not comment in detail on request for this article.
“To all my colleagues facing some tough news today, if there is anything I can do, the culture that a small Modern Life Experience team has created in a giant company has been very special. I’m thinking about it,” an employee wrote on LinkedIn.
Microsoft has previously said it plans to lay off less than 1% of its 180,000 employees as markets deteriorate and the risk of a recession looms. The company has also significantly delayed hiring. Searching his Microsoft careers website for either “Modern Life Experiences” or “MLX,” as they’re known internally, didn’t turn up any job openings.
A previous job posting described the team as “bringing consumer products directly to the people who need them. Our mission is to enable families to learn, explore and connect in a fun and safe environment. ‘ explains.
The MLX team began its existence as the startup Mobile Data Labs, which developed the popular mileage tracking tool MileIQ. After Microsoft acquired the company in 2015, the team was first rebranded under his MileIQ name and later given a new moniker, Modern Life Experiences, in keeping with its broader mission of thinking outside the box. was given. MLX is responsible for tools such as Microsoft’s Family Safety App and personal finance tool Money in Excel.
Microsoft has enjoyed great success selling to enterprise customers thanks to products such as the Azure cloud platform and the Office 365 software suite, but during CEO Satya Nadella’s seven-year tenure, the company launched the Windows Phone operating system. We saw the demise of , and the discontinuation of products such as: Microsoft Band fitness watch. Ultimately, Microsoft sometimes struggles to position itself as a consumer technology company despite the relative success of its Xbox game console and Surface PC hardware businesses.
Microsoft has been planning to win back consumers for years through a group called Modern Life and Devices, the paper was unveiled by executive Yusuf Mehdi at Microsoft’s Inspire conference in 2018. consumers,” Mehdi said at the time. “This year, we begin our journey to bring consumers back with Vision.”
Microsoft continues to offer consumer versions of its Microsoft 365 subscription and its Teams chat app, but MLX appeared to be central to its efforts to win over so-called “prosumers.”
In response to a request for comment, a Microsoft spokeswoman pointed to a statement by Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood at the company’s July earnings call. Discipline. “
Do you work for Microsoft or have an insight to share? Please contact Ashley Stewart at
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