As part of its program of layoffs, Microsoft is closing its Silicon Valley Research Labs with the loss of 50 jobs. The Trustworthy Computing Group is another victim of the cuts.

The plan to cut a total of 18,000 jobs, 14 percent of Microsoft's worldwide workforce was outlined by the incoming CEO Satya Nadella back in July. 

Around 13,000 employees were given notice in the initial round of cuts, with the former Nokia phones being a prominent casualty.  Now a further 2,100 notifications have been issued including 50 to top-level engineers and scientists, based in  Mountain View, California at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley.

Led by Roy Levin the group focused on Distributed Systems and its current projects included Naiad, an investigation of data-parallel dataflow computation,

Worldwide Microsoft Research has a dozen labs with around 1,100 researchers engaged on advanced projects. So 50 job losses represents a cut of less than 5%. However, closing an entire facility in this way comes as something as a shock, even if around a third of its 75-strong complement will continue their work at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View or be given positions in other Microsoft Research labs, including those in Redmond, as ongoing research projects are consolidated across the remaining labs.

Following the layoffs, Microsoft will still employ more than  a thousand scientists, constituting one of the largest basic research teams within a corporation. 

Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, which works on cybersecurity and privacy issues, is also being broken up as part of the wider scheme of rationalisation with some jobs being affected.

For Trustworthy Computing employees who are not losing their jobs those on the technical side will in future report to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and enterprise and those who worked on policy issues will be under Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel and executive vice president of legal and corporate affairs.

Microsoft Research has been responsible for some of Microsoft's best and most exciting products recently and there are more in the pipeline. Research is, by its very nature, wasteful and the tempation to make cuts in what appear to be unproductive blue sky research is ever present. This cut, however, doesn't seem to be part of a bigger re-evaluation of Microsoft's research investments, but it is something worth keeping an eye on.  

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