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How’s this for adding insult to injury: Microsoft has asked some of its 1,400 recently laid-off workers to pay back some of their severance pay because the company accidentally overpaid them

Talk about adding insult to injury. Apparently Microsoft has inadvertently overpaid severance to some of its recently laid off employees, and is now asking for some of the money back.

Update: CNET reports that Microsoft has decided to allow any workers who were overcompensated to keep the money. The story also notes that around 25 workers were overpaid, and around 20 underpaid.

45 errors out of an earlier reported 1400 employees laid off. Do the math, that’s between 3 and 4 percent. Okay, this sort of story can fire up the public easy enough. God knows this blog loves bashing MS. The fact that MS makes a mistake and the press picks up on it is understood as it sells. Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate. Then why do so many still use their products? It is the main reason this blog bashes MS.

That MS let this go far enough to become a story is typical Microsoft. Just like the near infinite list of problems with anything MS since their beginning the problem reaches epic proportions due to lax damage control or not thinking things through before acting. But the MS customer base shares in the problem by not holding their vendor accountable. If they keep screwin’ up and you keep buying there is no incentive to do things right the first time, every time.

For this particular Microsoft oops at least one question remains unanswered. Did MS implement the severance arrangements using their own software, doing it manually or by some other means? Maybe using their own software is why no further comment can be found from the company on this part of the topic.

Microsoft, making major problems out of minor ones. One of the few constants in their history.

Stanford Matthews
MoreWhat.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 1:38 am and is filed under Money Matters, Technology, wordpress, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.