[AbbeFaria]

This matches my experience at MSFT. Very little work for too many people, MSFT CFO also said in the latest earnings calls that MSFT will have fewer people next year than this year, they offered buyouts to tenured people, did layoffs in LinkedIn not sure if there’s more to come.

[treis]

Think this is the FAANGs entering their stodgy middle life phase like Oracle et al did decades ago. Except for Google they haven't done anything innovative in like a decade. It's time to wring money out of the monopoly and buy companies to add to that.

[AbbeFaria]

It’s more nuanced than that. There are lines of business where there is plenty of growth and places where growth has stagnated or business is decelerating.

In the former, you can see some of the products that MSFT is shipping such as MAIA chips, Azure Horizon DB, MSFT Fabric, Sovereign clouds etc. These businesses are seeing steady growth and there’s plenty of work to be done whereas for products like IoT, XBox and anything to do with gaming in general etc you will see that there isn’t much growth left and yet these products have a lot of headcount behind them.

So MSFT isn’t stagnating (revenue keeps increasing). Although there are quite a few businesses within MSFT that can use a lot of headcount reduction, this is my take as a low level L63 grunt.

[treis]

These businesses didn't stop growing. They grew by how you say. Steady growth into adjacent markets and acquisitions. Not through innovative new products.

It's just a different mindset. It's no longer move fast and be first. It's well we'll get there eventually. Let's do it cost constrained and with minimal risk.

[iejwjw]

This is the take nobody is ready for! Everyone is under the illusion that growth is infinite and there are no periods where things jam to a halt and we get stagnation.