Microsoft have published a memo recently sent to staff by CEO Sayta Nadella, which addresses the strange fact of Microsoft reporting net income in the ultrabillions while laying off thousands of supposedly “treasured colleagues”. Most of the blog is a gusty, jargony paean to generative AI technology, in which Microsoft have made vast investments, and how it is going to “empower everyone to create their own tools” and create a “local surplus” of Ability To Do Stuff in Microsoft dominions worldwide.
Nothing in the blog directly addresses what Nadella characterises as the “seeming incongruence” of Microsoft being richer than all of the Roman emperors combined, and still taking a blowtorch to video game studios like ZeniMax Online Studios, King, Rare and Sledgehammer Games. But I guess it’s nice that they’ve recognised that the optics are weird.
“By every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving – our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right,” Nadella writes. “We’re investing more in CapEx than ever before. Our overall headcount is relatively unchanged, and some of the talent and expertise in our industry and at Microsoft is being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before. And yet, at the same time, we’ve undergone layoffs.
“This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value,” he continues. “Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding.”
Ah, whomst amongst us can fathom the dissonant enigma of trillion dollar corporations spontaneously having layoffs happen to them, while doleful executives float by on golden balloons, scratching their heads with bloody hacksaws.
In other news, Microsoft have reportedly been replacing developers of Candy Crush Saga with the generative AIs they helped to “train”. Satya Nadella is apparently a religious genAI user, and I do wonder whether that’s a “local surplus” of capacity that could justify some further cost-cutting, as per the glorious mysteries of progress.
