But it's a weird idea. The assumption is that the activity of a company is limited to a static set of things and that when those things require less activity (b

But it's a weird idea. The assumption is that the activity of a company is limited to a static set of things and that when those things require less activity (because the market shrinks) then the people are not required. In fact companies are constantly starting and changing business activities, and their people should be being moved onto those new activities, sometimes these activities fail, and I would argue that the shock is the result of a set of these transitions failing, resulting in a collapse of the organisms ability to adapt - and layoffs. This is what seems to be happening at IBM and HP - their management (at all levels) has stopped being able to find new activities for their workforce, and this failure is creating the shocks. My belief is that this is due to a disruption - specifically Hadoop, which has torpedoed the market for differentiated servers and software in enterprise data. "The Machine" was an attempt by HP to ride this out and find an new set of activities (by redefining enterprise computing) maybe the 3D crosspoint announcements from Intel have convinced the HP Enterprise management that the gig is up for this and there is no point in continuing?