What Nadella (Microsoft) said about Big Tech’s post-pandemic hangover
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tells Davos that the technology sector will have to learn to be more efficient after the period of pandemic euphoria. Big American tech companies – Microsoft included – have announced mass layoffs. All the details
Given the recent mass layoffs, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella thinks the tech sector needs to learn to be more efficient.
WHAT NADELLA SAID IN DAVOS
“There has been a rapid acceleration during the pandemic” in demand, Nadella said during the Davos World Economic Forum . “I believe that today we will go through a phase of normalization of demand. We will have to do more with less; we will have to demonstrate our productivity gains with our own technology.”
BLOOMBERG REVELATIONS ABOUT NEW MICROSOFT LICENSES
Bloomberg revealed on Wednesday that Microsoft plans to lay off an as-yet-unclear number of employees in its engineering divisions. According to the agency's source, the cuts will be "significantly larger" than those made last year, in July and October, which affected less than 1 percent of its total workforce (about 200,000 people).
USEFUL SPEAKS
On January 24, the company is expected to release earnings data for the second fiscal quarter: forecasts speak of growth of 2 percent, which would be the lowest since fiscal 2017.
Despite this slackness, Nadella said technology spending should accelerate once the current economic cycle passes. According to the CEO of Microsoft, artificial intelligence is one of the technologies capable of stimulating growth.
– Read also: Will ChatGPT really be a big deal for Microsoft?
NADELLA INVITES YOU TO TRUST YOUR EMPLOYEES
Nadella thinks many tech companies suffer from a "productivity paranoia" about their employees. "Every leader somehow thinks they're not productive," he said, "but everyone who works in the organization feels burnt out."
NOT JUST MICROSOFT: ALL THE LICENSES OF BIG TECH
Microsoft is not the only major US technology company ("Big Tech", in jargon) to have made significant cuts in its personnel.
Amazon, for example, announced the layoff of more than 18,000 people, 6 percent of the total workforce, a record for the company. Meta, Facebook's parent company, has fired more than 11,000, 13 percent of the total. While Twitter, after the ownership passed to Elon Musk, reduced its number of employees by 3700 units, and is continuing on this path.
US ride-hailing company Lyft announced it was laying off 683 employees, 13 percent of the total. Salesforce's restructuring plan, which deals in cloud computing, calls for a 10 percent cut of its workforce of 80,000 people: it explained that it "hired too many people" during the initial phases of the pandemic, characterized by strong demand of digital services.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/satya-nadella-settore-tecnologico-efficienza-licenziamenti/ on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 06:13:05 +0000.