Microsoft cuts 5,000 jobs. That's the big news of the week. Not just because the layoffs will cut one in 20 of Microsoft's 91,000 employees. Not only because it signals just how hard Microsoft has been hurt by the failure of Vista and by shifts in the way big customers license and use software. Not even because of the grim sign it represents for the rest of the IT industry.
No, it's big because it means Microsoft has begun to hit bottom.
And it's about time. For the past couple of decades, we've been referring to Microsoft as the new IBM. But Microsoft has never learned the lessons of the original IBM — not even the ones that Microsoft forced Big Blue to learn.
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