I really don’t understand what Microsoft is doing here, well I will just pretend to be willfully ignorant for a second:
When company such as Microsoft is presented with the gift of drastic improvement in productivity, why is their first reaction to lay people off? Shouldn’t they capitalize on the gains, take on more work, release more products gain market share and make more money? Microsoft is a software company. Why aren’t they releasing more software? Why are they laying people off in their video games studios?
There are so many segments of the software and hardware industry they could enter or re-enter or expand. Video editing software, music production software, social media, micro computers, consumer electronics accessories…
Either they have no leadership or they know the productivity gains are not real, or both.
I think they know/strongly suspect that the bubble is about to pop. They are trying to drastically cut expenses to better weather the coming economic storm.
Microsoft is in the looting-by-executive phase of development, I don’t know why. I suspect that they see hard times for the company ahead and are extracting every cent that they can before the hammer falls.
My opinion
New products take a long time to plan, develop, and launch at large companies like Microsoft. Laying off 60k employees is quite a bump in quarterly revenue.
Only way I can possibly make sense of it is to put myself in the shoes of a capitalist executive. My job is on the line with AI companies reporting massive losses and an earnings call is coming up. If I don’t care about human beings, I can just lay them off and that will reduce headcount expenditure so that earnings looks better after spending massive capex on AI. Not to mention the market rewards such announcements by increasing stock valuations since we’re running more lean.
However, such a large amount of layoffs could prove unpredictable for workplace morale.
What if we didn’t have to pay most of the benefits we do and allow many of our headcount to choose on their own when to leave? We look better in the public eye, we can have a lead time for a couple months so that this earnings report on Wednesday will look like a massive shift for the year end earnings call when we’re looking for more investment. We’ll be operating so lean it’ll be insane. And anyone who doesn’t leave voluntarily we can simply lay off afterwards and it’ll be a smaller number of layoffs, which the public already treats as normal operating procedure, weeding out the undesirables.
Let’s do it.
Microsoft is really testing Xeno’s Paradox with this repeated firing of large percentages of their workforce.
Offering buyouts to 60k people is not the same as looking to remove 60k employees. A lot of those people are not going to take them, and MS has that factor into the number they offered.
But its also not not the same as looking to remove 60k employees. Right before my company did forced layoffs, they offered voluntary packages like this with the stipulation that if enough people didnt take them, it’d transform into involuntary layoffs.
They are offering this to 60k employees and should all of them take it, that’s 60k fewer employees at the end of the day. Of course it’s unlikely for that to happen but not impossible meaning they’re prepared to lose all of these people.
I don’t know the details of the microsoft offer, but at another company we had a few of them, and the ‘fine print’ was:
- If too many people applied to participate, the company reserved the right to deny applicants
- If someone was deemed too critical, executives reserved the right to reject individual cases
So offering to 60k does not mean they actually accept the risk of all 60k leaving.
More interesting is the logic of a ‘buyout’. Now the superficial assumption is that it’s better for morale, but as you saw, it’s pretty much certain that morale will be hurt by an involuntary layoff action anyway after the buyout. But maybe you could argue the hit was softened by the buyout earlier…
However, I think the actual goal is to disproportionately get the people in their 60s, the folks that given the right ‘nudge’ will just nope out into retirement. They would love to do that in layoffs, but historically that has hit age discrimination suits. Whenever we had a farewell celebration in a buyout, the people were mostly people at retirement age.
There’s a more obvious demographic that they’d be cutting. The US government / Trump administration is blocking things like international visas etc, and demanding that people who work on gov contracts be US citizens – and they’ve specifically targeted / highlighted Microsoft as a ‘problem’ on that front. Microsoft hasn’t disclosed which regions these ‘buyouts’ are impacting.
My guess would be that its largely in places like India, the EU and Canada. Especially as the more US gov control is excerpted, the more data sovereignty pushes get attention, the less business MS projects outside the US.
That’s what they did with the first VEO, where it was available to anyone who’s age and years of service added up to 70. In order it went 15K layoffs, VEO for 70+ which 30% took, then another 5K layoffs after it closed.
Now it’s just everybody on your team if your team is eligible. Managers also weren’t informed beforehand as they were included as well.
With my friend, they got the offer, so did their entire team they talked to as well as their manager and their skip. And that’s across Azure, the real money maker, and Teams - CoPilot.
Hire to create the illusion of growth, fire to create the illusion of competence. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
Yup, exactly what we need to fix the AI/Human Slop software they have been spitting out for a few years now.
I believe they knew they’re losing the pc market.
They dismantled windows team like 6 months ago.Edit: I could not find a source.
Losing to who? Use any office PC anywhere and it’s almost guaranteed to be a Windows PC.
Actually what’s funny is now that companies are using Active Directory and on prem infrastructure like file servers and whatnot less and less, I’ve seen a big resurgence in MacBooks in the enterprise space.
Yeah, I haven’t used a windows PC for work in like a decade.
Maybe the home PC market, but they havent cared about that segment in a long time.
Wow. Source?
I admit it that I couldn’t find a source.
I remember reading an article posted here on lemmy around the time Asha Sharma shared her email to all Xbox employees about job cuts taking about how Microsoft focused on cloud and AI to the point they move around 4k engineers working as Windows team to other teams.
Still closed I believe.
That’s a good one
Very good. If it all goes up in flames nobody will have a copy and nothing of value will be lost.
Every Lemmy Linux head. Lol.
Makes sense, the line must go up at all cost. This years profit has to be way way way WAY bigger than last years, otherwise what is even the point of running a multi trillion dollar business.
At that point you might as well try to improve life for everyone on earth right?
Unless you are a fucking piece of shit.
Yes, sadly. Microsoft made 193 billion dollars in profit in 2025, and has only made $225 billion dollars in profit this year. The investors are basically starving to death
What, you expect them to eat food without gold leaf?
Go ahead and remove the other 75% as well.
I’m with this guy
That would be great for Linux adoption. I’m all in with this news.
including those working in AI experiences, Copilot, finance, human resources, Xbox and Windows + Devices
Joy. Well, maybe that means they’re moving away from copilot…
You say that but they just force added it to my locked down customized Windows 10 install
Why would they fire AI ‘marketting’ division to fund AI investments? you’re to push back on that, there are not in fact 5D chess?
‘AI experiences’ go in favor of moar datacenter for AI bros to play with.
Basically the infrastructure play has started running out of loans, and the market is switching to who can secure the most debt in a stingy market. So moves like this try to mitigate the hit to credit ratings, trying to avoid what has happened to Oracle for example.
I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure I understand.
Its ok, Microsoft doesn’t understand either
Marketing is excluded.
Yeah but tech division that is shoving copilot everywhere is not 🤷
Possibly because AI scam is moving into the consolidation phase where a handful of large companies will own it all and they don’t really have to market any more
Hurry up - need more SRE talent on the open market
