"..laid off tens of thousands as a counterbalance to pandemic overhiring." That's the real issue here.

)ne paragraph "...The AI race raises the stakes for Microsoft. The company met the cloud computing revolution unprepared and has no desire to be caught flat-footed again. So far this year, the company has pumped $80 billion into AI infrastructure investments......"

Reminded me that, Microsoft was caught flatfooted with the rise of the internet too. Interestingly, have seen comments that this was mentioned in the 1st edition of book "Hard Drive" but 2nd edition had this information removed ....