[harkinian]

I highly doubt those 80% were working on ideological stuff. It's common in big tech companies to have too many cooks in the kitchen, and because the design process and tech stack tends to mimic an org chart, stuff gets semi-permanently more complicated as a result. There are also some teams doing projects/research that wouldn't normally make a lot of sense, but the interest rates were so low at times that companies had to stretch to do more random things.

Sometimes after a change of ownership, they cut whatever they consider fat. This is Broadcom's strategy for example, acquire and cut.