Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says 'Microsoft is Thriving' Following Layoffs - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 25 July 2025 / 3,986 Views
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has addressed the recent layoffs at the company in a message sent to employees this week.
He states "Microsoft is thriving" despite the "uncertainty" of the times and the recent layoffs. He says the "overall headcount is relatively unchanged" at the company.
Nadella said this is an "enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value" and provides the company new chances "to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before."
He went on to discuss AI and that is "about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools" and to "imagine if all 8 billion people could summon a researcher, an analyst, or a coding agent at their fingertips, not just to get information but use their expertise to get things done that benefit them.
"And consider how organizations, empowered with AI, could unlock entirely new levels of agility and innovation by transforming decision-making, streamlining operations, and enabling every team to achieve more together than ever before."
Read the letter to employees below:
As we begin a new fiscal year, I’ve been reflecting on the road we’ve traveled together and the path ahead.
Before anything else, I want to speak to what’s been weighing heavily on me, and what I know many of you are thinking about: the recent job eliminations. These decisions are among the most difficult we have to make. They affect people we’ve worked alongside, learned from, and shared countless moments with—our colleagues, teammates, and friends.
I want to express my sincere gratitude to those who have left. Their contributions have shaped who we are as a company, helping build the foundation we stand on today. And for that, I am deeply grateful.
I also want to acknowledge the uncertainty and seeming incongruence of the times we’re in. By every objective measure, Microsoft is thriving—our market performance, strategic positioning, and growth all point up and to the right. We’re investing more in CapEx than ever before. Our overall headcount is relatively unchanged, and some of the talent and expertise in our industry and at Microsoft is being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before. And yet, at the same time, we’ve undergone layoffs.
This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value. Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.
The success we want to achieve will be defined by our ability to go through this difficult process of “unlearning” and “learning.” It requires us to meet changing customer needs, by continuing to maintain and scale our current business, while also creating new categories with new business models and a new production function. This is inherently hard, and few companies can do both.
But I have full confidence that we can, and we will once again find the resolve, courage, and clarity to deliver on our mission in this new paradigm.
With that context, I want to re-ground ourselves in our why, what, and how: our mission, our priorities, and our culture.
Our why: mission
What does achieving our mission look like and feel like for us as a company? When Microsoft is succeeding, the world around us must succeed too. This is why each of us chose to be here, and as a company it’s how we earn our social permission to operate. When Bill founded Microsoft, he envisioned not just a software company, but a software factory, unconstrained by any single product or category. That idea has guided us for decades. But today, it’s no longer enough.
We must reimagine our mission for a new era. What does empowerment look like in the era of AI? It’s not just about building tools for specific roles or tasks. It’s about building tools that empower everyone to create their own tools. That’s the shift we are driving—from a software factory to an intelligence engine empowering every person and organization to build whatever they need to achieve.
Just imagine if all 8 billion people could summon a researcher, an analyst, or a coding agent at their fingertips, not just to get information but use their expertise to get things done that benefit them. And consider how organizations, empowered with AI, could unlock entirely new levels of agility and innovation by transforming decision-making, streamlining operations, and enabling every team to achieve more together than ever before.
That’s the empowerment our mission enables, creating local surplus in every company, community, and country. And that’s our opportunity ahead.
Our what: priorities
To deliver on our mission, we need to stay focused on our three business priorities: security, quality, and AI transformation.
We are doubling down on the fundamentals while continuing to define new frontiers in AI.
Security and quality are non-negotiable. Our infrastructure and services are mission critical for the world, and without them we don’t have permission to move forward.
We’ve made substantial progress across SFI, QEI, and Engineering Thrive this year, and they remain top priorities to ensure that we continuously improve our innovation velocity and our operational metrics.
We will reimagine every layer of the tech stack for AI—infrastructure, to the app platform, to apps and agents. The key is to get the platform primitives right for these new workloads and for the next order of magnitude of scale. Our differentiation will come from how we bring these layers together to deliver end-to-end experiences and products, with the core ethos of a platform company that fosters ecosystem opportunity broadly. Getting both the product and platform right for the AI wave is our North Star!
Our performance this past year has positioned us well. And we must move forward with the intentionality and intensity that these industry shifts demand.
Our how: culture
Growth mindset has served us well over the last decade—the everyday practice of being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. It has reshaped our culture and helped us lead with greater humility and empathy. We need to keep that.
It starts with each of us as individuals and our personal drive to learn, improve, and get better every day. Professional rewards, growth, and pride in our craft will always be the prime drivers. Beyond that, we each have the opportunity to connect our personal passion and philosophy of how we derive meaning from the work we do with Microsoft’s mission to empower the world. This is what makes it all worthwhile.
This platform shift is reshaping not only the products we build and the business models we operate under, but also how we are structured and how we work together every day. It might feel messy at times, but transformation always is. Teams are reorganizing. Scopes are expanding. New opportunities are everywhere. It reminds me of the early ’90s, when PCs and productivity software became standard in every home and every desk! That’s exactly where we are now with AI.
Years from now, when you look back at your time here, I hope you’ll say: “That’s when I learned the most. That’s when I made my biggest impact. That’s when I was part of something transformational.”
What we’ve learned over the past five decades is that success is not about longevity. It’s about relevance. Our future won’t be defined by what we’ve built before, but by what we empower others to build now.
And I know that with your dedication, drive, and hard work we can go win together, and change the world in the process.
I look forward to sharing more at Earnings next week and addressing your questions at our next Town Hall.
Satya
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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What a load of corpo horseshit.
This is some real bullshit thing to say after laying off so many.
I's like a King ignoring the peasants below, because he never personally meets any of them.
"I didn't even notice, there are 10% less of them now you say? Whatever" The thing is we know that like ~5000 are from like xbox studios and thus game developers. That is a large amount of people going away, and will likely delay output of games.
The photo says it all really.
He looks like he secretly molests and murders random children.
Most people understand that investors only care about lining their pockets. And they love executives that put their profits of human life. They best kind of exectuive to them is the kind that gets a certin type of satisfaction from grinding on the gristle between the bones of other human beings. Can't really get better than Satya who looks like a man perpetually chewing on the flesh of the poor all while proclaiming advancement. The future is here!
The future fucking sucks.
This guy only ever likes to talk about AI.
Bet it'll be his fault when AI starts killing thousands of people. The Terminator was a warning.
What a POS
Hey Nutella, fire yourself and replace it with AI and take all your money. See how it feels
M$ fired over 9000 employees alone this year. As long as Satya Nadella 's job is secure, everything is "Thriving"... Come back Bill Gates, M$ is "tumbling down the rabbit hole" for a while now.
We're doing really well.... but choose to lay off nearly 10% of our workforce, for higher profit margins, to please investors, in these uncertain times. Anyways... workforce is "relatively unchanged" (aka I don't meet any of these underlings or peasants myself, so I didn't even notice them going away).
Just because their small side venture is doing badly doesn't mean the overall company isn't doing well. And yet they aren't the biggest innovator in AI...hmm failure there too. They should invest more and cut less jobs.
A completely tone deaf statement.
He's only saying that because he layed off thousands while giving himself a big raise.
Fucking ghoulish.
profit first!
Revoke their H1-B visas...
Fire yourselves instead of laying off fcken kunts and then we will see who's really thriving
Yeah, my portfolio is doing great. My advice, put your money with the evil rich companies.
That makes feel really dirty when investing, but it's working better than I wish it was. Still haven't invested into Meta though, that's too dirty for me.
Unless your portfolio ignore the S&P500, then you own some.
True, but to a lesser extent than if I had bought Meta myself.
Not sure what it is that you guys want businesses to do. These publicly traded companies don't even really have a choice in the matter. They have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. If you can be replaced by AI, these executives have a fiduciary duty to replace you with that AI. Publicly traded companies are not charities. They exist for one reason only, and that is to create shareholder value.
It doesn't matter if Microsoft makes 10 times more money next year than they did this year. If they can lay off another 10,000 people and replace them with AI, they would be wrong not to do that. They don't owe anybody employment. The only thing that they owe is a return on the investment made by their shareholders.
That's a really terrible situation as far as I'm concerned, but it's also not really possible to argue against it. That said, voicing dissent about this can be a way to affect this: If a company sees enough dissent, it might consider whether that dissent has an effect on profitability and hence reconsider its stance. In that sense, voicing dissent makes perfect sense, despite the actions of companies also making sense.
Also, for comparison, I think here in Finland companies are only supposed to make profit for their owners, not necessarily maximize it - or at least's that's the form I've often seen myself. Not sure if that's the case in the US as well (but sounds like it's not, assuming you're correct).
Lets say that at first A.I can start replacing workforce that does like paper work, ect....
lawyers, doctors, Teachers, ect are impacted. They lay off every other doctor, and fire like 80% of teachers, and maybe something like that with lawyers.
Then eventually the robots will be walking around well enough, to do manual labor.
The intire world will feel the impact, if these big companys that earn tons of money are suddenly all made up of robots.
People will be unemployed for the most part, simply because there is no need for them.
At some point in the future, a robot and ai, will do anything a human can... better.
How does society function without allowing people to work?
How do companies make money, if they have no one to sell products too? (because everyone is unemployed?)
"hey have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. If you can be replaced by AI, these executives have a fiduciary duty to replace you with that AI. "
This could lead to a collapse of our society, and you just say it so casually.
If that happened overnight, it would be a big problem. But it won't happen overnight. It will happen very slowly, over decades. It has been happening for decades already. Technology advances, and it frees up humans to do other things. That's how humanity progresses. It's a good thing.
That's not how it works. Maximizing profit by leveraging technology to replace jobs does not free up humans to do other things, it only pushes them to worse job positions and takes away bargaining power.
It only benefits the majority and society in general if the fruits of the technology can be meaningfully leveraged by them. And that almost always happens in spite the intentions of shareholders and CEOs, not because of it.
The thing is, we already have a couple hundred years of recent history to look back on. (Really, it has been happening since the dawn of time). While there certainly has been some discomfort along the way, particularly for those whose jobs are eliminated, technological advancement has always been a good thing for humanity. Everybody benefits when technology advances and makes human labor less critical to a given task.
