Its that why my taskbar keeps disappearing requiring restart? A small bar pops up when I press the start button, but disappears when I load a menu. Quality product.

Meanwhile in KDE, I can multiple taskbars of different sizes. I have 3 in the SAME row. A tiny one for virtual desktops, a tiny one for a usage monitors, and ofc the normal one, half my screen size wide. For such high-tech M$ would probably need a human lifetime, or 20k agents.

HOLY CRAP I can move my taskbar again! Thank you for letting me know, I had long since given up

I can land a tech job as is. Too much experience for a tech support role and not the exacting experience employers can find with an army of WFH techs to pick from.

Yes, for a short while between firing the employees and then learning why whey were there in the first place. Then the line will go down until further people are fired in the next round. The venture capitalist's ideal company consists only of a CEO and the room cleaner (because some work has to actually be done).

You'll enjoy this

https://youtu.be/LtvPbNf7dPM

This is simpler than you think. AI is a bubble. It is a giant bubble.

Many people, including many government workers, are getting rich right now by riding the bubble. They and their funders have zero interest in worrying about what will happen when it bursts.

(Also, AI is vaporware. It can't replace workers in huge numbers. So nobody serious is actually worried about that... Of course there are some occupations that have shifted, but far fewer than you would expect.)

government is dependant, because they want the hallucinating mass surveillance that palantir does, and also its a useful propaganda tool.

my little piece has already gone to shit. incoming revenue is under half what it usually is at this point in the year.

I worked tech support for 13 years before finally burning out in 2018. So glad I am NOT in tech right now!

Self employed in IT, nope, I will be fine.

Like others said, it looks better next quarter than a bunch of new projects. Short term gain vs long.

But also, their expenses from all that hosting and usage are high. They’ve masked it creatively, but that only works so long.

Maybe they’re trying to make their balance sheet look less catastrophic in the short term (again, at the expense of the long term).

Whatever it is, that will be the underlying theme. Things must look good immediately, at the expense of sustainability.

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

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.

thier execs and csuites expect a golden parachute thats why.

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 profits.

That too, but also everyone is getting replaced with AI now

Unfortunately, people are extorted into their products.

Xbox is a fraction of Microsoft's total revenue. The golden goose is corporate Windows and Office, 85-90% of company profits. Sometimes seems they'd be better off just dropping the whole product.

It would be kind of entertaining to see what happened if all 60k people accepted the offer, though. I’d be surprised if the company expected more than 10% to do so. Probably even less.

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.