[TallGuyShort]

Layoffs are a sign that a company has been struggling, or has been slowing, or has grown disproportionately in personell, but that someone is doing something that probably needs to be done. It is not always the solution, but it is also not a sign of ultimate doom.

[Spooky23]

From what I've heard, if you're not working on cloud services, you're a dinosaur.

They just let go of XP and cloud services are making the need to support office version X for 10 years less relevant. MS must spend a ridiculous amount of time & treasure supporting old crap.

[adamnemecek]

> MS must spend a ridiculous amount of time & treasure supporting old crap.

But backwards compatibility is kind of the reason why a lot of customers buy MS products.

[neutronman]

They sold Windows 3.1 until the year 2008. I would agree that they spend way too many resources on the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x

[kevin_thibedeau]

They still sell embedded DOS. Supporting legacy products is good customer service. It's not like they were spending tons of resources to maintain the code.

[jmspring]

Sometimes there is overlap, sometimes there is extra baggage, sometimes there is redundancy...What there is and what is left depends on how things are handled.

Sometimes the recurring "let the bottom 5% go" that companies like Cisco do might actually make sense.