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This week Microsoft offered a voluntary exit to around 60,000 employees across the US, UK, Canada, and India – about 27% of its 223,000 workers. Even vice presidents are within reach. This isn’t a round of layoffs, though it may be the prelude to one.
Is AI behind it?
That’s the usual reading. It comes in two versions. The first is that capital spending is heading to $170 billion, up from $23 billion five years ago; Microsoft needs to cut staff to pay for data centers. The second is that the company has become AI-pilled, and agentic loops are running rings around headcount. There is a more mundane explanation too. Like many tech firms, Microsoft hired hard during Covid; maybe now it needs to work off the bloat.
But none of these fit the facts. It’s no to Covid and not-yet for AI. That leaves one last rationale… the company is more productive than ever, and it is betting it can go much further.
Microsoft’s revenues and headcount have both grown tremendously over the past two decades. Since 2022, they have parted company.
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Revenue growth has outpaced headcount for four years running. In the year to June, the gap was 20%, the widest on record.
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The kind reading is that, like many tech companies, Microsoft carried Covid bloat and has spent the last four years working it off. Headcount has been flat, sales have ballooned.
The pesky facts get in the way. Covid hiring was real. Microsoft added 58,000 people in the two years to June 2022, almost exactly the size of this voluntary offer. But if that was bloat, it has long since been absorbed. Since 2023, the company has laid off 25,000 people and has had four years of no headcount growth. And the offer is not aimed at the Covid cohort. Engineers hired under Steve Ballmer’s tenure are as eligible as those hired painfully over Teams.
And whatever bloat there was, it didn’t stop margins from rising even as revenues strengthened. Revenue per employee is up two-thirds since 2022, to $1.5 million.
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A firm with its healthiest margins in history is not carrying 60,000 unproductive passengers.
Offering a quarter of your staff the option to leave, with a severance package that costs real money, takes extraordinary confidence in how lean the business can run tomorrow.
What does Microsoft see coming that others don’t? In the rest of this post, I unpack the bigger bet behind its exit offer – and the signals that will tell us whether that bet is paying off.