No Microsoft Corp. worker is safe from the massive cutbacks that CEO Satya Nadella unleashed in July as part of his efforts to refocus the company on high-growth markets such as cloud computing and mobile services, the latest layoffs make clear.

In a move that appears to reflect a new level of urgency to Nadella’s consolidation plans, the Redmond giant has closed one of its flagship engineering facilities and released dozens of world-class scientists into the job market – and the welcoming arms of its competitors. The Mountain View site reportedly employed a team of 75 that focused exploring new applications for distributed computing – the fundamental concept behind the cloud – in areas such as natural language search, data privacy and network security.

But although the lab itself is no longer operational, Microsoft is still clinging to its Silicon Valley research investment. Projects that were ongoing at the time of the termination have been transferred to other research facilitates along with key members of the original team, which indicates that business will continue more or less as usual at those sites for the foreseeable future.

As for the more than 50 scientists who have left Microsoft, they’ll be competing for new positions alongside 747 former colleagues from the company’s Puget Sound location and another 160 who were laid off in various other California cities. The cuts came as part of a broader reduction that affected 2,100 Microsoft employees throughout the U.S in what represents the second phase of Nadella’s plans to eliminate 18,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of the company’s workforce.

The latest cuts follow the sacking of 12,500 professional and factory workers from Nokia Devices and Services, the handset business of the namesake Finnish giant it acquired for $7.2 billion earlier this year. Yet while that reduction was met with approval from analysts, Nadella’s decision to dismiss more than 50 of Microsoft’s top researchers may raise concerns that the CEO is making strategic sacrifices to drive short-term results. That tactic proved disastrous for Hewlett-Packard Co. under former head Mark Hurd, whose actions have cost the company years of development time amid massive changes in the enterprise landscape.

Nadella says he hasn’t made any major compromises on R&D and he has repeatedly stressed his commitment to not only preserve but double down on core businesses such as Xbox. The third and final round of layoffs will reveal whether the closing of the Mountain View research lab heralds broader change for Microsoft or merely marks an isolated event along its journey to becoming a leaner and more focused organization.

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