7,800 jobs is nothing to joke about - Peter Cohen for iMore

This week Microsoft announced plans to cut almost 8,000 jobs, mostly associated with Microsoft's smartphone division. Some in the tech press took no time at all to exclaim that Microsoft's smartphone ambitions were dead, and I saw more than one roundup of "Microsoft's greatest failures."

Message to my tech brethren and sistren: Try harder not to be such douchebags. If you take any sort of joy, even schadenfreude, in seeing this happen, make no mistake: You're a horrible human being.

Remember this every time layoffs are annoucned. Even if you're an Apple/Google fan and hate Microsoft, your feelings are for the company, not the people who feed their kids by working there.

You can still have opinions on what strategic implications a layoff can have, but don't be callous about the thousands of lives which are about to be thrown into potential chaos.