1. MS over-hired, has too many employees, and not enough work?
2. MS is reaping the benefits of AI and can do the same work with fewer employees?
3. MS has over-invested in data-centres and needs to conserve cash to stay in the game during it's unprofitable phase (assuming it's not a bubble)?
Given how abysmal Copilot was/is, and how buggy their software has become this year, it's clear that they aren't reaping any benefits from AI usage internally.
most office workers seem to want at least the 20 usd per month plan
This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming, but is useful for day to day office work - and I belive it can sell very well
Office work is many fields in many businesses of all shapes and sizes in many industries. It doesn’t make sense to generalize.
Similarly, Google is improving Gemini and still dominates pretty much everywhere else from the phone to the car and on the web.
They don't have to have the best LLMs to finally deliver on the value they promised over a decade ago. Applications are always a much better moat, and it's not like anyone was going anywhere else anyway. I'm fully expecting Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon to reap soon and buy up datacenters for pennies on the dollar. Market won't crash because China was smart enough to pause and maintain the hardware shortage.
> This can mean nothing who uses AI for programming
It doesn't matter because AI programming never got much buy-in outside of leaner teams working at startups. Startups will continue to migrate towards running their own local models. The corporate world does have some limited use for greenfield and misc tech debt, but will always be slowed down by the need for much larger scale human collaboration. The LLMs don't move the needle at all on productivity when the changes remain small (the parts people agreed on after all the teeth pulling) and the sprints and deadlines are still long.
MS must be losing mountains of money over this.
Microsoft overhired due to the spike in global usage during the pandemic. Some jobs are being automated but it’s more a question of "How many." And Microsoft was one of the first to start dumping its cash reserves into data centers. There is a good chance these will remain profitable even after any sort of bubble pop because they still remain a hyperscaler that can provide services beyond just AI compute.
overall, given where the economy is at and how much of their war chest is gone, im not surprised to see this happening.
Look at this optimist over here thinking people will still have jobs to lose in 16 years.
They over hired and are still no where near their pre-pandemic numbers.
That said, for the past 3 decades at least, tech was a hugely growing sector that provided ever growing employment opportunities. It seems like that time is now over. Even if you take the "Jevon's paradox view" of AI, that is that the cheaper cost of writing software will feed a demand explosion, it's just hard to imagine that many more people will be needed to fulfill that extra demand.
This is why I think it's fair to think "this time it really is different". In past technological revolutions, it really wasn't that hard to see where the new jobs would come from. Now even the leaders of the AI revolution think it will kill tons of jobs. I get a bit worried about the number of young people and friends' kids who decide to major in "business" in college now. It just feels very difficult to imagine a white collar career that will be stable over the next 10 years or so, let alone an individual's 40 year career.
I think this is an extremely pollyannaish view of how technological revolutions have happened. In fact, it is always the exact opposite, people always fail to predict where new jobs would come from.
It was completely obvious in the 80s, and I say this because I lived it, that you would need tons of people building software and in tech generally as PCs and related tech killed off a slew of those admin assistant jobs.
But even then, I would only buy that for the very short term, because AI is designed to (eventually) implement that step, too. As an analogy, I always wonder who is paying for these "how to use agentic AI" courses I see pop up all the time now. Literally just ask it! I asked Claude to build a course for me to get comfortable understanding agents and harnesses and it did a fantastic job.
Typists and data entry work cratered, but overall admin support actually went up.
There are hundreds of millions of workers in the US, and about 5 million computing professionals right now. There are 3.5m workers in admin assistant roles.
The growth in computing employment is totally overshadowed by parts of the workforce. BLS' "Management, business and finance" grouping grew by 19m since the early 80s.
Nobody knows what the equivalent to this is going to be until the economy starts reorganizing itself.
This isn't pandemic over hiring, its layoffs to create fear and give them an excuse. I guarante you, and I'll put money on this. No matter how many people they let go with this, in six months they'll be employing even more than they do today.
It impacts absolutely everything. The dynamism from a growing org is gone. Managers have very slim opportunity for promotion. If you need people, you have to find them from another team. I'm relatively new on my team with 5 years there.