[foobarbazic]

You seem to be missing the point - Blizzard is running out of steam, and the layoffs reflect this fact. Google has an insane number of people who are more or less building castles in the sky, and it essentially never occurs to anyone that there will be mass layoffs. It is hard to get fired. Google does this because they have the $$$ and are wildly imperialistic.

This means Blizzard management is thinking that they're running out of ideas for developing new areas.

This is the beginning of the end for Blizzard, which is fine with me - WoW is basically electronic crack as far as I'm concerned. I know that's narrow, but they're public enemy #1 in terms of habit-forming online behavior.