> Interestingly enough, it looks like everything except cloud grew at a rate less than inflation. I mean, that's to be expected. Google did this sweeping cost

> Interestingly enough, it looks like everything except cloud grew at a rate less than inflation. I mean, that's to be expected. Google did this sweeping cost cutting measure with the layoffs they did, rather than the usual “we don't see a future in this product and we're discontinuing it” that they are more famous for. They didn't even seem to try to target a specific performance bar—I think of this as trying to knock out walls which have lower measures of structural stresses in your house, you don't have the architectural plan so you just sledgehammer some walls that look like they're not holding much up. The problem with these broad cost cutting measures, “everyone is losing 5%-10% of head count” etc. is that even if you do a really good job targeting, 80% of the people you cut were doing something (just, if you are well-targeted, not enough on average to justify their salary) and 20% of those were in fact “load bearing” in some sense (they actually were doing enough to justify their salary, often “and then some”)... your metric just did not apply very well to them. The rest of the building needs to carry the load that you just shed, average performance takes a staggering hit. The bet is that the cut costs will save more than the performance drops, although they won't immediately due to expensive severances etc. ... Those numbers were carefully timed to be paid out in Q2 so expect those numbers to be worse and then if Pichai’s bet pays off they'll start recouping it in the second half of 2023, or else he'll feel the same pressures in late 2023 that he felt in late 2022, announce another round of layoffs... Things aren't that bad yet but I worry for my friends at Alphabet.