Downsizing
MS has been steadily shedding employees for a few years now.
Managing a shrinking company is much harder than managing a growing one. The main problem is that your best people are actively looking for somewhere else to work, and when they leave they take a lot of the corporate knowledge with them.
Management will try to slice off entire departments in order to find the numbers that are to be let go. Otherwise the important bits end up getting hollowed out as the best people leave. This would leave the entire company in difficulty.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
