Microsoft Lays Off 200 Employees from Marketing Division

Since recession begun, American companies are busy laying off people. In recent turn of events, Microsoft has laid off roughly 200 people from their marketing department including their Chief Creative Officer Gayle Troberman. She is the one who came up with “I’m PC” campaign to counter Apple’s Mac vs PC ad and has been working with Microsoft for 16 years now.

According to Microsoft, due to low revenues, they plan to shift creative advertising responsibility to the product teams of Bing, Xbox and Windows.

Apparently, this move has been decided by the newly installed chief marketer Chris Caposella who led marketing for product group office before taking bigger responsibilities.

The layoffs will include people from Microsoft’s consumer-marketing group and business group.

Let’s see how this moves helps microsoft with alignment of marketing with the business needs. It maybe a good move to involve the product team to plan marketing, but how creative they can be, only time will tell.

But it is really disappointing to see that layoffs still continue when people are trying to be optimistic about getting out of recession.