This seems a common theme: even in a company like Microsoft that takes pains to emphasize and support the IC track in addition to management there is a tendency towards creating layers that end up reducing agility.
Maybe it's just an excuse though. I am surprised they announced the 3% rather than just accomplishing it with attrition and slowing hiring. Maybe it looks smart to stockholders so they want the attention.
When an unassuming orc get ambushed by a couple of ambitious elves his budget gets chopped, you get fired, and he has limited time to find an alternative to stay afloat. And he's swimming in a much smaller pond than you. So trust me, they may not seem to bring much to the table on a daily basis, but they definitely play in your team.
Of course when the tide comes they will be the first to jump the ship and switch the team leaving you behind, but that's a different story.
Because uncalculated 3% is a smaller number than 6000?
https://esd.wa.gov/employer-requirements/layoffs-and-employe...
Well, let's see: Rounding corners of buttons and window borders, making bigger titlebars for Office programs and increasing space between GUI elements, adding one more click to access the menu in Win 11, adding an useless "theme" setting with "default", "dark" or "light", where "default" can be either "dark" or "light". I think they call this innovative UX/UI, increasing startup time for all programs, etc.
barbazoo•8mo ago
Ok, sure, what does that mean though.
> The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April.
Agree! Better tighten the belt. Don’t want to dip below $100 billion net income a year.
lwo32k•8mo ago
The earnings call transcript is more useful than these stupid news articles - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q2...
Basically Azure earnings were at the low end of their own projections. And their explanation was Azure non-AI services earnings have dropped as customers who have ongoing non-AI projects are working out how to incorporate AI services.
PKop•8mo ago
Stratechery:
Everyone is very excited about the big Azure beat, but CFO Amy Hood took care to be crystal clear on the earnings call that the AI numbers, to the extent they beat, were simply because a bit more capacity came on line earlier than expected; the actual beat was in plain old cloud computing. From Hood’s prepared remarks:
Focused execution drove non-AI services results where we saw accelerated growth in our enterprise customer segment, as well as some improvement in our scale motions. And in Azure AI services, we brought capacity online faster than expected.
Hood further clarified in response to a question:
Just to provide some clarity because I think your question implies something that we didn’t mean to imply on the call. First, the real outperformance in Azure this quarter was in our non-AI business. So then to talk about the AI business, really, what was better was precisely what we said. We talked about this. We knew Q3 that we had and hadn’t really match supply and demand pretty carefully and didn’t expect to do much better than we had guided to on the AI side. We’ve been quite consistent on that.
So the only real upside we saw on the AI side of the business was that we were able to deliver supply early to a number of customers. And being able to do that throughout the quarter creates quite a good benefit to us. But the majority of our outperformance versus where we had expected to be was on the non-AI piece of the business.
zeroq•8mo ago
I was shocked and flabergasted that someone could stand in front of couple hundred people and tell them with the same breath that the situation is so dire that we have to stop using printers and we'd better start bringing our own toilet paper to the office, and complain that the company only made 2 billion last year, which is absolute disaster and the company won't surive if we won't adapt.
I was even more shocked when I approached fellow colleagues after the townhall, whom all seemed to completely swallow the pill - "you heard it? bollocks, right?" - "yeah, but you saw the charts, it's absolute disaster. I'm glad they took my bonus and let me keep my position".