For the most part, I'm indifferent to layoffs. Companies over hire and then course correct. It's part of the game. But for MSFT, it rubs me the wrong way. In the past 5 years, their stock has soared (150% on stock and doubled in valuation). They are insanely profitable ($82B profit). They are diverse (no existential business risk). The fact that they are unceremoniously laying off 30K of the people that helped them get there drives home it's just a paycheck, do your job, but know it can and will end when convenient for the company. I know folks will argue, low performers, but really. This "productivity apps" company hired them, onboarded them, made $82B in profit, surely they can figure out how to uplevel folks. Also how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years. Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively ensured a labor job meant a secure future. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
> Thinking about the middle class in the previous generation, it was unions that effectively ensured a labor job meant a secure future. I wonder if that's the solution (again).
It is, and they are. It’s why Reagan fired ATC strikers and blackballed them. It’s why private enterprise stockpiled machine guns and chemical weapons against strikers back in the Gilded Age. It’s why companies will spend billions to block Unions rather than just give workers the few million or so more they need over a decade to just maintain a standard of living. It’s why they’ll close down stores, warehouses, offshore jobs and outsource to contractors to penalize Unions.
Unions are a direct response to the inequality of Capital allocation and distribution.
I know, I know, "union bad." I guess people will say that until all that is left is a person to watch the Machine, and a dog to bite the person if they touch the Machine. Or all the jobs are offshored to the cheapest labor on the globe.
"union bad" people are why Microsoft can just do this. And do it again in 3 months. And in 6 months.
If people would rather lose all job stability their parents had as a career instead of coming together to work in their best interests, what can you really do?
Layoffs have always been part of the game. There is reason to believe this latest set of layoffs are different (Scott Hanselmann himself said so on LinkedIn recently - "Laying off my staff is never easy, but this is the first time I've had to lay people off for someone else's business goals" whatever that means).
"Nadella addressed the recent layoffs, clarifying that the decision was not based on individual job performance. “This is a structural change, not a reflection of how people were performing,” Nadella explained. He emphasized that Microsoft is shifting its strategic focus, with a renewed emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), which the company views as a key driver of its long-term vision and growth."
AI is the convenient scapegoat. Companies frame mass layoffs as a strategic shift toward AI to boost margins and excite investors, but in reality, it signals a deeper business crisis. Not one of these 9,000 jobs will be meaningfully replaced by AI anytime soon.
I'm indifferent to layoffs. I dislike layoffs these days because it directly fuels the "AI is replacing our jobs" brainrot and then fuels the "AI is the future" hype train.
It's not impossible for this to be Microsoft's way to keep the AI flywheel spinning.
I think we can all agree that the real damage caused by layoffs is their effect on the publicity surrounding AI, not their effect on humans and their well being.
>how do you have a layoff every couple of months for 3 years
It has absolutely nothing to do with managing out low performers or managing existential business risk. It has everything to do with managing annual EPS to Wall Street's expectations. There was an inflection point at the end of 2022 where Revenue growth slowed so to maintain Earnings growth, costs had to be cut continuously, and this process is still playing out.
1. Over hiring isn't really a thing here. They knew what they were doing and knew they could just kick people out if things changed. I don't like that term to describe the situation.
2. That's how it is for most of these high profile layoffs. They are profitable but do layoffs so they can report record revenue later. It's not about "we can't afford workers", it's about blatant greed in 90% of cases this decade.
3. Yeah, talent retention is gone this decade. They don't care about growth or fostering future labor.
Not everyone wants to be "upleveled" which often actually means work on something completely different.
This idea that companies must be the social safety net is deeply flawed, you want companies to take risks on new business lines that may not pan out. That's how we get innovation. In order to have that, you must not heavily penalize taking those risks.
The issue is they are laying off US workers and then importing Indian workers to replace them via 3rd party contractors. I saw a post on X today which essentially said "Ai will not replace your job, an Indian with Ai will replace your job" - this was posted by an Indian and he was completely right. Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of the salary.
At the same time our politicians appear to be looking everywhere for a solution to increasing US jobs except for right where the issue is. Everyone else sees it but our politicians are willfully blind.
Like Japan, we have insufficient young people to do the jobs and produce what's needed to support the old.
Worse, the old have utilized money printing and their privileged position to enrich themselves, and in the process it is tearing the country apart, and through economic manipulation force conscripting the young at suppressed wages to pay their debts off (i.e. social security).
Thomas Paine would have a lot of similar things to say if he were alive today, specifically about dead men ruling.
The economics given such lopsided movement cause chaotic disruption and deflate and are unsustainable.
You are wrong insofar as they'll be earning a 10th of the salary. That may happen upfront, but in terms of purchasing power it will reach parity much more quickly given the macro monetary dynamics going on.
When reading history, I could never imagine how bad it would need to get to make a multi-generational citizen abandon their home country and immigrate elsewhere.
I have my answer today. They do so when there is no reasonable path to a survivable future.
There are times where a reasonable person can see and know everything will burn, because there is nothing that can stop it, and the only thing you can do is remove yourself and your family from the path of that burn.
> Microsoft is actively laying off people with 150k salaries and replacing them with offshore workers earning a 10th of the salary.
I know the talking points on HN like to portray Indian developers as cheap, low quality labor, but contrary to popular belief, they aren’t getting workers for $15k. A Median senior developer earns almost $90k in India in Microsoft.
I think you are highlighting the truly important bit here - that megacorporations are economy's cancer. I am on the side that work is work, there should be no emotional connection, except for the personal relationships. It is fine that companies hire when they need resources and fire when they don't. However, a small company might lay off 10 people and they will quickly disperse in the available work pool. However, laying off 30k people at once does serious damage to the market and the prospects of those laid off people.
In fairness they aren't a real company anymore, they are more like state apparatus/granted monopoly.
The profitability they embraced was derived from surveillance capitalism which comes from a money-printer seeing as the government is the one paying for it.
It was short-term up-front profit, followed by what inevitably comes after where they pay it back and more. They are laying people off because they wanted that short term profit more than they wanted to do business. There is a potential that they may chase this having the same dynamics as deflation, given that free money is largely no longer available suddenly (which pops the bubble).
The people making those decisions knew the laws and countries would catch up to them eventually but they still did it.
I was raised in a union-supported household. I've posted about it on HN before, but the tl;dr is that I'm still conflicted because:
- Pro: My father only graduated high school, yet was able to support a middle-class family - a house, two cars, 3 children, healthcare, etc., all with his union trucking job. That is almost unheard of today.
- Con: My father often talked about the corruption, like work being throttled to meet only the minimum output requirements in the union contract, and guys just sitting around, playing cards for half-a-day because it only took them a few hours to meet the requirements. (And new guys would get "talked to" in the parking lot if they tried to do too much work.)
What's really the difference between union guys playing a little bit of cards on the boss's dime and the boss paying you poverty wages so he can upgrade to a bigger yacht? might as well pick the option that's going to have your back.
Talking about stock price is in fact indication of layoffs being working not other way round. I don't think people are arguing against "job is just a paycheck" in last 5 years. In the same vein for company "employee is just a cost".
Union may save job for few who have job but people who don't (and they are lot more and increasing) are not gonna get helped by any union.
> Union may save job for few who have job but people who don't (and they are lot more and increasing) are not gonna get helped by any union.
Note that in some countries, unions extend to cover workers who are not even part of the union. Heard about this from some french friends:
> Collective bargaining agreements (conventions collectives) may be negotiated between employers and labour unions covering a company or group of companies (accords d’entreprise), or between employers’ associations and labour unions covering an industry as a whole; in the latter case, the government may decide that the collective agreement covers even those employers who are not members of the employers’ association and is therefore mandatory throughout the industry.
They're still hiring though. If layoffs are a prereq for hiring fresh blood, maybe it's worth the cost? Especially if hiring is weighted toward new grads and junior engineers, which are in the midst of a historically bad employment market right now. It's a stretch, but just a thought.
the first responsibility of any company is profitability. they have no economic, moral or ethical obligation to keep employees (no matter how well they performed), if it doesn't help them be more profitable. this should not be news.
I think "low performance" is typically just a scapegoat. the real reason is they simply don't need that many empolyees to maximize profitability.
This is Milton Freidman hype and brainwashing. A company profiting in a society has a responsibility towards that society. In Germany, they accomplish this by having one union representative on the board. Profit at any cost leads to a society where workers are paid just enough to prevent starvation so that there are workers.
it's not even that man, it shows insecurity in their growth and future business, they're terrified they took the wrong bet on their massive investments into Ai, or the perception of those investments.
A layoff is a complete and utter failure in leadership top down.
Then applying for 6k visas that are going to be compensated well below industry levels is just a complete joke.
Not to hate on immigrants… but shouldn’t H1B’s be the first on the chopping block of layoffs? Hard to imagine all those H1Bs are so unique that others already employed can’t replace them.
I was on L1 (with Canadian PR, so it wasn't totally critical for me) during 2010 or so layoffs/firings, and I've heard rumors that they were trying to spare H1s/L1s because it's a giant pain to get fired as one. I don't think it's related to paycheck; after being encouraged to relocate from Canada (on PR i.e. not dependent on the job) to the US (on L1 i.e. worse than H1) my paycheck went up a bunch for the same job.
How does that even work? You take away thousands of people in the market selling (presumably these were enterprise sales, not low end consumer stuff that "sells itself") and what happens to revenue? This strikes me as classic bean-counter logic that sees all sales and marketing effort as pure cost and assumes it can be eliminated while simultaneously viewing revenue as a constant, with no relationship between the two. Really an extension of the view that you should just eliminate all of the engineers first, because they're the most expensive. Too many people in the C-suite detached from their products and their customers, who see their company as just numbers in a spreadsheet.
This is the future for all tech companies. Tech workers in the US are the modern day factory workers. Offshore skill set rise plus AI means the end of US tech jobs in the next decade just like it meant the end of US factory work in the 90's.
Everyone in tech thinks they are special but companies will always do what they can to reduce costs and tech salaries are some of the biggest costs companies have. They're going to do everything in their power to reduce them.
Earlier in my career I worked for a tech industry-famous CEO who is long retired.
One of the most unconventional things he taught me was that “our highest obligation is to employees and their families. Second is to investors. Third is to the communities we operate in. Obviously don’t ever say this in a board meeting or investor conference”.
And he meant it. When products got cancelled, people got reassigned. Terminations for poor performance happened but were individual cases.
I’m quite sure the idea of firing people to goose the share price never even crossed his mind.
Hi @crmd For that tech industry-famous CEO, did the company that they used to run continue/preserve even a little bit of that good and common-sense approach? Because if so, then I'd love to know the name of the firm...so that i can immediately apply for a role there. (My profile has my email address if you wish to keep the company name sharing private.) Mind you, I'm employed, but, ahem, less than enthused with my current state of affairs. :-)
Did the company crash? In other words, was it a sustainable way of working, or was it a way that did not only end up removing the jobs of those who would have been fired, but also those who wouldn’t have been, destroying more jobs than it saved by reassigning people?
I don’t remember when it became normalized for profitable companies to casually execute major layoffs. It used to be a “shameful” last resort that CEOs turned to as a last ditch effort to save a company facing bankruptcy.
I suspect it’s related to the stock buyback safe harbor rule (Rule 10b-18.) Layoff announcements used to be a sign of a company in crisis, now the stock price often immediately rises, perhaps because shareholders are anticipating a short-term windfall.
The Wall Street bros love layoffs. They think it makes a company more efficient. They don't see it at all as a problem with management, they just think it's a great idea. So the stock often goes up with a layoff announcement.
there is no lost love between me and Wall Street "bros" BUT it's not their job to run the companies, their job is to buy and sell shares based on results and potential future results.
When a company decides to go public and take their money it's still the company's responsibility to run their business and keep the people they took money from in exchange for shares happy.
It was a first, and then the entire collection of CEOs showcased their herd mentality by jumping on that bandwagon. It's kinda like the anti-poaching collusion that happened... gosh, 10 years ago!
...only, this time, there's some bullshit "economic headwinds" arguments being advanced as reasons for these layoffs.
I remember experiencing actual belt-tightening in 2008-09, where it was disgraceful-but-necessary-to-save-the-company. It's nothing like that this time around.
Microsoft's most recent quarterly numbers, for those interested:
- Revenue was $69.6 billion and increased 12%
- Operating income was $31.7 billion and increased 17% (up 16% in constant currency)
- Net income was $24.1 billion and increased 10%
How can you justify needing layoffs when you made $24B in net income on $70B in revenue?? I guess $24B and a 10% YoY increase is almost failing?
I'm not going to defend Microsoft, but you don't budget based on current achievements. You budget on future prospects, and right now Microsoft is facing some tough times in Europe. The biggest IT expense in my country is the public sector buying various Microsoft licenses, and everyone from the top down are looking into replacing Microsoft with Open Source alternatives due to digital sovereignty.
I doubt that has a big impact on Microsoft's gaming divisions, but it would help explain why they might not think the previous decades of growth will continue.
> You budget on future prospects, and right now Microsoft is facing some tough times in Europe. The biggest IT expense in my country is the public sector buying various Microsoft licenses, and everyone from the top down are looking into replacing Microsoft with Open Source alternatives due to digital sovereignty.
As they should: "Trump’s sanctions on ICC prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work". [0] Bert Hubert has been writing on the subject as well. [1]
It is like we need to find a "post stock market" capitalism? The stock market is kind of the original crypto scheme after-all. Capitalism doesn't require a stock market.
Xbox has really become a sore point in the MS portfolio. Their pivot to a marketplace model where their games run everywhere is an admission that they lost the race to Sony. Block buster acquisition like Activision further have exacerbated their conundrum.
What Xbox is now can be done by a much smaller number of people.
>Their pivot to a marketplace model where their games run everywhere is an admission that they lost the race to Sony.
Don Mattrick has a lot to answer for. Microsoft was killing it during the seventh generation and he was able to burn everything down over a period of two days. Xbox never recovered after that.
Don Mattrick isn't the reason that so many Microsoft studios have repeatedly shipped poor products or failed to ship at all over the past decade. Don Mattrick isn't the reason reason that Microsoft still seems to have the worst taste-testers in the industry. Don Mattrick isn't the reason that internal studios like 343 have messed up 18/6 requirements. Don Mattrick isn't the reason that Microsoft kept acquiring, messing up and then firing studios, ending with a massive acquisition that can't even pay itself off for over a decade. And above all, Don Mattrick isn't responsible for the relentless drive for a weird fusion of unprofitable subscription service and cloud streaming offerings at the cost of overall game sale profits.
Don Mattrick's mistakes were near-fatal, but Phil Spencer's done more than his equal share of torpedoing the Xbox division. The blame at this point can rest squarely on his shoulders.
Well, him, and the person who refuses to replace him.
Surprisingly no mention of AI in an article about mass layoffs at a tech company. Wonder if that line has finally had all the juice squeezed from it to explain away layoffs and outsourcing.
AI works as a smokescreen when doing product development layoffs, but you can't really use it for sales, which is still very human-to-human, or when canceling entire projects like they're doing in XBox Game Studios.
I knew this was coming when Microsoft brought Activision. As ex game industry I nearly started crying at the news.
Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
I don't recall reading any official statements, ever, that said layoffs were due to AI replacing engineers. Do you have examples? I think that line gets thrown in by reporters that don't know what they're talking about, or HN/LinkedIn users that haven't actually read the statement.
I could easily be wrong; I can't say I've thoroughly perused every layoff statement from big tech, but I frankly don't even see how it would be positive PR that you're replacing workers with machines, much less worth outright lying about.
> Microsoft Corp. began job cuts that will impact about 9,000 workers, its second major wave of layoffs this year as it seeks to control costs while ramping up on artificial intelligence spending.
And AI is a bullet point in the "Takeaways, powered by Bloomberg AI" section as well.
These recent Microsoft layoffs make no sense. Hitting all across the organization, performance, and tenure levels with no real pattern. Are the layoffs going to continue until moral improves or what?
I really want to destroy this blatant lying by tech CEOs that these are layoffs because of AI, tax laws or interest rates. Most tech companies have headcounts at their peak or slightly below. Whenever these amounts are fired, often near equal amounts are hired in India (and not counting L-1 transfers into the US, H1Bs etc). AI is a fiction invented to cover up the true reason: tech companies have adopted a long term strategy of profit making by wage arbitrage. They have identified their largest cost to be people, and are working to fix this.
Readit News
It is, and they are. It’s why Reagan fired ATC strikers and blackballed them. It’s why private enterprise stockpiled machine guns and chemical weapons against strikers back in the Gilded Age. It’s why companies will spend billions to block Unions rather than just give workers the few million or so more they need over a decade to just maintain a standard of living. It’s why they’ll close down stores, warehouses, offshore jobs and outsource to contractors to penalize Unions.
Unions are a direct response to the inequality of Capital allocation and distribution.
I know, I know, "union bad." I guess people will say that until all that is left is a person to watch the Machine, and a dog to bite the person if they touch the Machine. Or all the jobs are offshored to the cheapest labor on the globe.
Hey that's actually a great line. It might be even better than the original, where the person is there to feed the dog.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/30/future-factory/
If people would rather lose all job stability their parents had as a career instead of coming together to work in their best interests, what can you really do?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/zoology-us-microsoft-old-time...
Layoffs have always been part of the game. There is reason to believe this latest set of layoffs are different (Scott Hanselmann himself said so on LinkedIn recently - "Laying off my staff is never easy, but this is the first time I've had to lay people off for someone else's business goals" whatever that means).
Edit: Allegedly not.
https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-microsoft-c...
"Nadella addressed the recent layoffs, clarifying that the decision was not based on individual job performance. “This is a structural change, not a reflection of how people were performing,” Nadella explained. He emphasized that Microsoft is shifting its strategic focus, with a renewed emphasis on artificial intelligence (AI), which the company views as a key driver of its long-term vision and growth."
Deleted Comment
It's not impossible for this to be Microsoft's way to keep the AI flywheel spinning.
It has absolutely nothing to do with managing out low performers or managing existential business risk. It has everything to do with managing annual EPS to Wall Street's expectations. There was an inflection point at the end of 2022 where Revenue growth slowed so to maintain Earnings growth, costs had to be cut continuously, and this process is still playing out.
It is a service, one side gives work, the other pays the bills, nothing else.
Be a good teammate, that is all.
2. That's how it is for most of these high profile layoffs. They are profitable but do layoffs so they can report record revenue later. It's not about "we can't afford workers", it's about blatant greed in 90% of cases this decade.
3. Yeah, talent retention is gone this decade. They don't care about growth or fostering future labor.
This idea that companies must be the social safety net is deeply flawed, you want companies to take risks on new business lines that may not pan out. That's how we get innovation. In order to have that, you must not heavily penalize taking those risks.
At the same time our politicians appear to be looking everywhere for a solution to increasing US jobs except for right where the issue is. Everyone else sees it but our politicians are willfully blind.
The main issue though is one of demographics.
Like Japan, we have insufficient young people to do the jobs and produce what's needed to support the old.
Worse, the old have utilized money printing and their privileged position to enrich themselves, and in the process it is tearing the country apart, and through economic manipulation force conscripting the young at suppressed wages to pay their debts off (i.e. social security).
Thomas Paine would have a lot of similar things to say if he were alive today, specifically about dead men ruling.
The economics given such lopsided movement cause chaotic disruption and deflate and are unsustainable.
You are wrong insofar as they'll be earning a 10th of the salary. That may happen upfront, but in terms of purchasing power it will reach parity much more quickly given the macro monetary dynamics going on.
When reading history, I could never imagine how bad it would need to get to make a multi-generational citizen abandon their home country and immigrate elsewhere.
I have my answer today. They do so when there is no reasonable path to a survivable future.
There are times where a reasonable person can see and know everything will burn, because there is nothing that can stop it, and the only thing you can do is remove yourself and your family from the path of that burn.
I know the talking points on HN like to portray Indian developers as cheap, low quality labor, but contrary to popular belief, they aren’t getting workers for $15k. A Median senior developer earns almost $90k in India in Microsoft.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/microsoft/salaries/software...
The profitability they embraced was derived from surveillance capitalism which comes from a money-printer seeing as the government is the one paying for it.
It was short-term up-front profit, followed by what inevitably comes after where they pay it back and more. They are laying people off because they wanted that short term profit more than they wanted to do business. There is a potential that they may chase this having the same dynamics as deflation, given that free money is largely no longer available suddenly (which pops the bubble).
The people making those decisions knew the laws and countries would catch up to them eventually but they still did it.
- Pro: My father only graduated high school, yet was able to support a middle-class family - a house, two cars, 3 children, healthcare, etc., all with his union trucking job. That is almost unheard of today.
- Con: My father often talked about the corruption, like work being throttled to meet only the minimum output requirements in the union contract, and guys just sitting around, playing cards for half-a-day because it only took them a few hours to meet the requirements. (And new guys would get "talked to" in the parking lot if they tried to do too much work.)
Union may save job for few who have job but people who don't (and they are lot more and increasing) are not gonna get helped by any union.
Note that in some countries, unions extend to cover workers who are not even part of the union. Heard about this from some french friends:
> Collective bargaining agreements (conventions collectives) may be negotiated between employers and labour unions covering a company or group of companies (accords d’entreprise), or between employers’ associations and labour unions covering an industry as a whole; in the latter case, the government may decide that the collective agreement covers even those employers who are not members of the employers’ association and is therefore mandatory throughout the industry.
https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en/knowledge/publication...
Not saying it's the right solution for $COUNTRY, but I was certainly surprised when I heard of this
Deleted Comment
I think "low performance" is typically just a scapegoat. the real reason is they simply don't need that many empolyees to maximize profitability.
corporations feel no moral or ethical obligation towards their employees.
Whether or not that should be the case -- and I think it should not be -- it is.
No that's what makes management the most money because they're paid in stock. So they want you to think it's legally required.
The first responsibility of a company is "act in the shareholders' best interests".
Is it in shareholders' best interests to have > 20% unemployment?
A layoff is a complete and utter failure in leadership top down.
Then applying for 6k visas that are going to be compensated well below industry levels is just a complete joke.
Dead Comment
1 - Microsoft investing 3bn USD in India-based developers: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-invest-3-bln-ex...
2 - Microsoft having 4700 H1B filings for fiscal 2025: https://www.myvisajobs.com/employer/microsoft/
Utterly predictable behavior by Satya Nadella.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/mic...
Everyone in tech thinks they are special but companies will always do what they can to reduce costs and tech salaries are some of the biggest costs companies have. They're going to do everything in their power to reduce them.
One of the most unconventional things he taught me was that “our highest obligation is to employees and their families. Second is to investors. Third is to the communities we operate in. Obviously don’t ever say this in a board meeting or investor conference”.
And he meant it. When products got cancelled, people got reassigned. Terminations for poor performance happened but were individual cases.
I’m quite sure the idea of firing people to goose the share price never even crossed his mind.
I suspect it’s related to the stock buyback safe harbor rule (Rule 10b-18.) Layoff announcements used to be a sign of a company in crisis, now the stock price often immediately rises, perhaps because shareholders are anticipating a short-term windfall.
When a company decides to go public and take their money it's still the company's responsibility to run their business and keep the people they took money from in exchange for shares happy.
It was a first, and then the entire collection of CEOs showcased their herd mentality by jumping on that bandwagon. It's kinda like the anti-poaching collusion that happened... gosh, 10 years ago!
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
...only, this time, there's some bullshit "economic headwinds" arguments being advanced as reasons for these layoffs.
I remember experiencing actual belt-tightening in 2008-09, where it was disgraceful-but-necessary-to-save-the-company. It's nothing like that this time around.
FAANG total headcounts have been trending down for years now (2-3).
I doubt that has a big impact on Microsoft's gaming divisions, but it would help explain why they might not think the previous decades of growth will continue.
As they should: "Trump’s sanctions on ICC prosecutor have halted tribunal’s work". [0] Bert Hubert has been writing on the subject as well. [1]
[0] https://apnews.com/article/icc-trump-sanctions-karim-khan-co...
[1] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/
Cut costs and make 25B next quarter! Cut more in US and hire in India. Make 27B in a quarter next year!
Don Mattrick has a lot to answer for. Microsoft was killing it during the seventh generation and he was able to burn everything down over a period of two days. Xbox never recovered after that.
Don Mattrick's mistakes were near-fatal, but Phil Spencer's done more than his equal share of torpedoing the Xbox division. The blame at this point can rest squarely on his shoulders.
Well, him, and the person who refuses to replace him.
Mergers always lead to layoffs, games aren't doing great as they're not essential in an iffy economy.
Microsoft is seeing the writing on the wall and cutting internal studios. It's much cheaper to just pay 3rd parties to release on Gamepass vs having to fund an entire games development.
I don't think we even see a real "Xbox" in the future. You'll have Xbox branded living room PCs with Windows. They're working on a gaming mode that I guess optimizes Win 11 a bit.
Getting a AAA games job will be much more difficult in the future.
I could easily be wrong; I can't say I've thoroughly perused every layoff statement from big tech, but I frankly don't even see how it would be positive PR that you're replacing workers with machines, much less worth outright lying about.
> Microsoft Corp. began job cuts that will impact about 9,000 workers, its second major wave of layoffs this year as it seeks to control costs while ramping up on artificial intelligence spending.
And AI is a bullet point in the "Takeaways, powered by Bloomberg AI" section as well.