microsoft announces a new round of layoffs wednesday as its c. e. o. tries to cut because the company will eliminate seventy eight hundred jobs mostly in its phone business bought from nokia for over seven billion dollars last year latest cuts coming in addition to the eighteen hundred jobs microsoft said it planned to eliminate in twenty fourteen microsoft has so far failed to turn the windows phone operating system into a platform rivaling apple's ios or google's android the planned cuts coming ahead of a july twenty ninth launch of windows ten a system designed to run across p. sees tablets and smartphones