It’s painful to watch this because the recipe for success at Microsoft is so obvious. They’ve just been fumbling the ball for so many years that it’s catching up to them. And the thing is they’re not unprofitable. Gutting their studios and technology development isn’t going to help growth, it’s going to contract the business.
Growth over a long period of time involves two things: consistency in vision, and willingness to take risks. We do not have a market designed to reward these things, at least not for the likes of Microsoft. For them, it's far easier to simply cut people while collecting on their previous labor. Once the product of that previous labor is no longer as valuable, it can then simply be spun off or shut down permanently.
Agreed. If you are looking at a chart of performance and it's flat or slightly increasing year over year for a few years, you're not doing great. You need to see some dips which means you tried and failed. Without those, you won't ever see the big jumps.