Summary: Microsoft saves money by reducing wages and avoiding tax

Microsoft has been hiring near SCO despite layoffs everywhere else in the Unites States. Overall, Microsoft is shrinking, but not all layoffs are created equal.

There is a lot to be learned from Microsoft's hiring/layoffs patterns, mostly because Microsoft favours areas of cheaper labour (like China and India) and areas of tax dodging, e.g. Ireland. We provided a lot of evidence before.

Last week was the last time we wrote about Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft manager who accuses Microsoft of offences relating to taxation. He showed that Microsoft is using Reno as a distant place from which to process transactions and thus avoid paying tax like everyone else. Reifman appears in this new article from the Seattle Weekly and while the Seattle press reports on Microsoft laying off in Washington, some days ago we also found this new report.

Reno's Microsoft outpost has grown from 40 to 250 employees

[...]

“This is an attempt for people to know more about us,” said Mary Ellen Smith, general manager of the Reno operation which employs 250 people.

Is it not interesting that Microsoft is shrinking almost everywhere while in Reno it grows more than six-fold? Is it not related to the routine which saves Microsoft about a billion dollars in tax? Who could be so gullible? Financial fraud is not foreign to Microsoft [1, 2, 3] and now there is a lot of noise out there about the Reno operations. That's where they stash the tax money they do not pay (Google, Intel, and Apple are not innocent, either).

“Financial fraud is not foreign to Microsoft and now there is a lot of noise out there about the Reno operations.”Speaking of which, Microsoft's CFO, who is aware of all this and also partly responsible, has just quit the company. What a good timing. Chris Liddell, who was partly responsible for this potential violation of the law, might even leave the country and go back to New Zealand, having dumped his shares in Microsoft [1, 2].

Nevertheless, there is no reason to worry about Mr. Liddell, who quit with his own (very personal) special loot.

Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell will get $1.9 million after he leaves Microsoft, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It is mostly/only covered by the Seattle blogs, which are of course reluctant to say something negative. Some of them are sponsored by Microsoft.

Moving on a little, in recent weeks we wrote about Kristof from the New York Times calling for a boycott of Microsoft search, which incorporates suppressive censorship in China [1, 2, 3] (it also censors the competition, as we showed repeatedly before). Microsoft Nick plays along with the pathetic Microsoft defence (excuse) that this was a "bug".

Microsoft claims it fixed a controversial "bug" that made Bing Image Search deliver uniformly pro-Chinese-government results to politically sensitive queries inputted in Simplified Chinese.

Bing came under fire on Nov. 20 from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who accused Microsoft of "craven kowtowing" to the Chinese government by offering "sanitized pro-Communist results" in response to Bing searches in Simplified Chinese for terms such as "Tiananmen" and "Dalai Lama."

We previously showed that Microsoft and Bill Gates are politically close to China, not just because both are totalitarian and suppressive. In the news we now find: "Microsoft Talks China Outsourcing"

Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) has outsourced more than $100 million of business to China in 2009, qq.com reported December 3 citing Wang Ying, Senior Director of Microsoft China R&D Group's China Outsourcing Center.

Yes, that ought to save Microsoft a lot of money, but the English-speaking press hardly covers this (qq.com is Chinese). It does, however, write about a recovery of a bankrupt company of Microsoft's co-founder. We wrote about Charter before. ⬆