LogIn"This is the enigma of success," said Satya Nadella on why the tech giant laid off thousands while showing strong financial performance.
Although I doubt many would be surprised to hear a tech company executive praise AI and tout the controversial tech as "the next stage of the internet" – you know, much like they did with blockchain and Web3 just a few years ago – doing so less than a month after firing thousands of workers, and worse, trying to justify said firings all in the same letter, can definitely leave a bad taste in one's mouth.
Still, optics didn't seem to matter much to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who issued a statement to employees extolling artificial intelligence and, at the same time, attempting to explain why the company let go of 9,000 workers despite showing relatively strong financial performance.
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In his opening statement – which, I kid you not, requires a corporate-to-English translator to decipher – Nadella offered an attempt to explain why, despite rising revenue, profits, and stock prices in recent quarters, thousands of employees still lost their jobs, calling it "the enigma of success," whatever that's supposed to mean.
"By every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving – our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right," the CEO said. "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. Progress isn't linear. It's dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it's also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before."
Having addressed the layoffs, along with the obligatory word salad about the job cuts being "a tough decision" for the execs and the affected employees being talented and so on – two and a half years into tech industry mass layoffs, you probably already know how this song and dance goes – Nadella wasted no time jumping into adulation for artificial intelligence, declaring that Microsoft must "reimagine our mission for a new era" – "the era of AI."
"Just imagine if all 8 billion people could summon a researcher, an analyst, or a coding agent at their fingertips, not just to get information but use their expertise to get things done that benefit them," Nadella continued. "And consider how organizations, empowered with AI, could unlock entirely new levels of agility and innovation by transforming decision-making, streamlining operations, and enabling every team to achieve more together than ever before."
As part of this "reimagining," the CEO named "AI transformation" as one of Microsoft's top business priorities, alongside product security and quality, stating that the company will continue "to define new frontiers in AI."
"We will reimagine every layer of the tech stack for AI – infrastructure, to the app platform, to apps and agents. The key is to get the platform primitives right for these new workloads and for the next order of magnitude of scale. Our differentiation will come from how we bring these layers together to deliver end-to-end experiences and products, with the core ethos of a platform company that fosters ecosystem opportunity broadly. Getting both the product and platform right for the AI wave is our North Star!"
Lastly, Nadella compared the AI boom to the early '90s, when PCs went from being used only by governments, tech firms, and tech geeks to spreading into "every home and every desk."
"This platform shift is reshaping not only the products we build and the business models we operate under, but also how we are structured and how we work together every day. It might feel messy at times, but transformation always is. Teams are reorganizing. Scopes are expanding. New opportunities are everywhere."
To dive deeper into the fascinating world of corpo lingo, AI veneration, and the fine art of conveying no information across numerous paragraphs, be sure to read the full statement by clicking this link. TL;DR – Principal Development Lead at Xbox Graphics promoting new job openings with an AI-generated image suddenly makes a lot more sense.
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