I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?
Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.
The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.
Apple is I think a different case as it comes after a (reverse) merger, in particular as the main product (the OS) was rebased from Next’s stack and not Apple’s legacy one.
Laying off redundant people after a merger is basically part of the plan, and it’s more akin to cutting off the bits that don’t fit in the new org (they’re bringing in 500 Next people at the same time), than “slimming down” in the sense of making the same org leaner and more efficient.
Or if we take that definition, car manufacturers merging and getting rid of thousands of workers as a cost saving measure would also count as successful slimming downs, and we’d have many more example of it. That would work as well.
The answer to almost every modern financial wizardry is M&A. Sure, a DCF yields the theoretical value of a stock’s stream of cash flow. But in reality, M&A secures that lower bound. Yes, an efficient firm may reduce headcount willingly. But in reality, M&A provides the culture shock.
A few people including myself remarked how it sounded like Google now
And I noted that I don't think Google will "ever" slim down, because they're making money and Apple wasn't
i.e. there's not enough justification for a leadership shake-up. Twitter had more justification -- there were many CEO changes and the board wasn't happy with the leadership
I would see a world where the ad business gets seriously impaired and Google struggles enough to keep up with the enterprise market that they lose out to MS.
In that fantasy world something like Salesforce could get bought by Google and they’d reshape the whole Google’s product tree to solely focus on enterprise money, and a landslide of redundant engineers would probably be let go.
Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.
The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.