I'm pretty sure that "to wind down" is not a proper euphemism for "to shut down". "Winding down" literally means that before shutting down, there is an increme

I'm pretty sure that "to wind down" is not a proper euphemism for "to shut down". "Winding down" literally means that before shutting down, there is an incremental process with the explicit purpose to smoothly move into the transition. There wasn't anything like that, not even a little. What's especially rich is that Engineering VP Mike Montano nonsensically repeats this phrase after the fact: "we made the difficult decision to wind things down right away". That's plain bullshitting. He should have said, "we made the difficult decision to shut things down right away". But that would have sounded super irresponsible! But it was super irresponsible, and describing it differently is just dishonest. And that wasn't accidental, this entire situation is exactly about the difference between "winding down" and "shutting down". Why do we allow people to communicate in this way? (publicly and/or from a position of leadership). Twisting words in plain sight. There is no good motivation behind this, it represents messed up priorities between appearance/saving-face and responsibility. I don't know anything else about this Mike Montano. Maybe he's a very good manager when not talking like this. But leadership comes with responsibility and when you twist words like that, it's only because you're trying to wriggle out from underneath the responsibility.