Microsoft Hosted Sting Performance in Davos on Night Before It Announced Layoffs
5 hours ago
Microsoft Hosted Sting Performance in Davos on Night Before It Announced Layoffs
By
Tom Dotan and
Sam Schechner
Sting performing last summer at a festival in Switzerland.LAURENT GILLIERON/SHUTTERSTOCK
On Tuesday evening, Microsoft hosted an event. It was an intimate gathering of 50 or so people, including the company’s top executives, who got to while away the evening listening to a performance by the musical artist Sting, said people familiar with the event.
The concert would end up sounding a sour note to some employees at Microsoft the next morning. On Wednesday—while much of the company’s leadership team was halfway around the world from its Redmond, Wash. headquarters—it announced plans to lay off 10,000 people. It’s the
largest layoffs Microsoft has had since 2014, and as CEO Satya Nadella would explain in a blog post, reflected the need for the company to adapt to a global economic slowdown.
Top Microsoft executives have been a major presence at this year's World Economic Forum. On Tuesday Mr. Nadella was interviewed on stage for a Wall Street Journal panel and he spoke about the
promise of artificial intelligence. On Wednesday he was on stage again, discussing the
headwinds for the tech industry, and the need to do more with less.
As the Microsoft layoffs came down, some employees described it all as a bad look. While hobnobbing at Davos is part of doing business for major tech corporations and the events are planned far in advance making it difficult to change them, some employees thought it wasn’t the right time for a company-sponsored Sting concert. The theme of the event was sustainability.
Many top tech companies have pivoted to cutting thousands of positions in recent months as the business climate has deteriorated on the back of economic slowdown concerns, high inflation rates, rising interest rates and other factors.
Last year Microsoft had more than one round of layoffs but didn’t announce how many positions it cut. One round, which started in July, affected less than 1% of the company’s total workforce of more than 200,000 people, the company said at the time.
Paid for sting and fukked over their workers the next day... wow...