• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 12, 2012

Sick of losing ground to Apple, Google, and Amazon, Microsoft is reportedly ready to restructure its marketing and sales operations -- again.  

With hundreds of jobs on the line, Bloomberg reports: “The changes would eliminate overlap in job responsibilities and are designed to help the company better respond to threats from Apple and Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which are increasingly targeting Microsoft’s corporate-computing customers.”

Having seen this all before, The Register remarks: “Another year and another shake-up is coming to Microsoft. A restructuring of the team responsible for how Redmond is perceived and sells itself will be announced in the next 30 days.” 

Reports ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley: “One of my contacts said 40% of the Central Marketing Group (CMG) could be chopped -- a number which seemed crazily high to me.” (CMG drives marketing and communications across all Microsoft businesses and products around the world.)

Crazy of not, as sources tell Bloomberg: “Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer doesn’t think the company is getting enough return on the billions it spends annually on marketing.”

“It's easy to see why [Ballmer] might be worried,” Business Insider writes. “Earlier this week, Forrester Research estimated that Apple will make $10 billion in enterprise hardware sales in 2012 -- that's up from essentially zero five years ago.”

Google, meanwhile, just announced its biggest win ever for Google Apps, as Spanish financial services giant BBVN said it will roll out Gmail and other Google products for its 110,000 employees by the end of the year.