Microsoft’s quarterly target – the numbers it’s planning to report for revenue and profit – could end up lower than their original expectations thereby forcing the gentle giant to shed “thousands of jobs,” according to Reuters.

Wall Street is looking for quarterly revenue of $17.1 billion, according to Reuters Estimates, also short of Microsoft’s own target of $17.3 billion to $17.8 billion.

This correction could cost Microsoft 6,000 to 8,000 jobs, about 6 percent of its 95,000 strong workforce. There could be more cuts later this year or there could be no lay-offs and they would lose the number by attrition and a hiring freeze. Either way, Microsoft’s salad days are over.

So what does this mean? Well, first off I’m kind of amazed that Microsoft has 95,000 employees. While I understand that Windows is a pretty big program, what are all these people doing? Could it be time for Microsoft to start crowdsourcing some of its projects and hire folks as remote contractors? Bug fixes could be done by Counter-Strike clans turned programming shops and the company could save fixed costs of keeping all those people in Seattle.

I know I’m being ridiculous and I’m actually torn – I hate it when people lose jobs and I’m constantly worried that my friends and relations will get canned. But seriously: 95,000 people? Did Microsoft HR look at those numbers one day and say “Whoa! We have 3,000 guys doing desktop backgrounds in building three. We need 1,000 guys to manage them.” Throwing more men at a job rarely gets the job done.

The online video editing space has become increasingly competitive. Click.tv recently joined the deadpool, with plans to reorganize.

On their blog post about the acquisition, CEO Evan Kraus says that since launch Rifftrax “has all but taken over our site”. The acquisition may play into the long term plans for full length movie remixing Kraus has alluded to before. Cuts differs from other movie editing projects that angered Hollywood by not changing the underlying movie, instead Cuts stores meta data that directs how to play through the movie and overlay effects. Post acquisition, Rifftrax will run Cuts.com, with plans to add features and the ability to remix Nelson’s commentary.

If you’re already working with video on the web, an online editor is fast, easy and free. In theory, these services could bring video editing to people who would otherwise never engage in it. People already engaging in video editing can benefit from automatic software updates and the sharing made possible by online communities.

Here’s a look at each of the services, followed by a more in depth chart comparing features.

Cuts
“Simple and easy, when you need edits now”
Cuts is the new kid on the block and is all about remixing viral video. They don’t host content, but instead take videos from other sites (YouTube, Google, Myspace). With Cuts you can trim, loop, add preloaded sound effects, and insert captions to enhance the original. Editing is straightforward, consisting of changes to the sound, caption, and navigation levels for the video. Every edit can be re-cut, embedded, and emailed. In the future, Cuts will be expanding into simple editing for digital movies and TV shows. See also our early look at Cuts a few weeks ago.

Gotuit
“For slicing and dicing scenes”
Gotuit Scenemaker is for slicing out scenes from videos on other networks. After importing a video into the program via URL, you can select a start and end for one or more scenes on the video, title, tag, and email the scenes to friends. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it to slice up Gotuit content.

Eyespot
“Mashups with effects, transitions, and titles”
Eyespot is a solid editor that lets you mix together your own Motionbox content or scenes from their promotional media packs. It has a simple drag and drop interface that lets you manage a wide variety of effects and transitions for both the audio and video layers. Eyespot lets you add your own audio and mix in photos as well. While you can’t grab video from other networks, Eyespot’s white label editor is becoming available on more and more sites. The NBA is one of the most recent additions.

JumpCut
“When desktop software is too expensive”
Jumpcut is the most developed of the editors, allowing you to add a long list of effects, transitions, and captions to the videos. It also incorporates fine grained control of trimming and audio levels (uploaded background audio and voice). The complexity of the interface makes it great for detailed edits and mashups, but borders on being too heavy an application for the internet.

Photobucket
“Cutting edge tools”
Photobucket just released a new video editing product that leverages the most recent Adobe Flash tools. Unlike any of the other services, users can “mash up” video clips with audio files and photos, and add effects and transitions.

Motionbox
“For trimming and joining”
Motionbox is best known for deep tagging videos, but they also have an editor that is ideal for trimming your Motionbox content and joining the videos together.

Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools.

Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video.

Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music remixing sites JamGlue and SpliceMusic. Cuts will add a few more bells and whistles after their public launch. Check out some screen shots of the service below, or sign up for the beta on their site.

We’ll be waiting for YouTube’s response to Cuts, as users begin to take YouTube videos and start to remix them. YouTube hasn’t been shy about protecting its turf in the past, and they are not going to like what they see at Cuts.