Last week, O'Reilly Media laid off 30 employees )(nearly 15% of their total staff), including the very experienced and talented editor, John Osborn. John was the editor for my book and not only held my hand throughout the arduous process but had a huge (beneficial) impact on the book when he took out the proverbial red-pen. There's no doubt that the tech book market has been on the down turn for a long time and things have gotten only worse lately. Good thing I didn't write my book with the hope to retire on the royalties. ;-)

So that's been heavily on my mind.

Then earlier this week, I started seeing rumors of 15,000 layoffs planned for Microsoft which I found hard to believe. At the same time, Intel laid of 5,000 people.

And then it happened. No, not 15,000 laid off. I was travelling today so didn't even catch the news until the late afternoon when I was back home preparing dinner while listening to NPR. And there was Mary Jo Foley talking about the first round of layoffs - 1400 today with 5000 planned over the next 18 months- at Microsoft. Certainly not 15,000 but still pretty painful for everyone involved.

The story seemed to point at the NetBooks and their very low cost that coulnd't support the cost of the Windows operating system. If Netbooks are selling for $300 including an O/S, what does that mean for Windows? Coincidentally, at the Philly.NET meeting I spoke at last night, the user group leaders showed off a Netbook (acquired from Dell as a special deal for $89) running the WIndows 7 beta on it.

Shock and awe, for sure. Not just for those of us with ties to Microsoft, but as a bellwhether for yet another tier of the economy visibly in trouble, this is big news in the financial world.

I ran down to my computer to start searching around for more insider news but it seems as though there's some type of gag order at Microsoft - nothing on any of my MS friend's facebook pages, nothing I could find on blogs.msdn.com.

The first thing I found was a blog post on SeattlePI saying that the cuts were mostly in Redmond.

The most interesting information is in the 300+ comments on MiniMicrosoft's blog post about the layoffs. Granted, you can never tell what is and isn't for real with anonymous commentors.

Mary Jo's All About Microsoft blog is probably the most dependable source.

My first thoughts were of DevDiv (the developer division) as that's where most of the people I interact with work and apparently right now that's not taking the toll here.

But I think everyone at Microsoft is in as much shock, so we'll just have to wait and see how it shakes out and hope for the best of our pals. One interesting article I saw on ComputerWorld's site suggested that this might be the dawn of a new slew of tech startups if so many talented folks are hitting the streets all at once.

As someone pointed out, in a time when everybody needs to trim down, a 5% staff reduction was probably going to happen sooner or later and perhaps shouldn't come as such a shock (except to those who got the pink slips, that is).

To top it off, the governor of Vermont laid out the 2009 state budget proposal today which included terminating over 600 state jobs. In a state with a population of only 600,000, that's a lot of jobs.