Definitely not the case for me at the moment, but I won't bore you with the details.
I don't think it would be cruel at all. If a company cuts entire chunks of the business (products, departments, what have you), it's because someone made a management call that they don't want to bear the risk and/or losses associated to that particular segment, or they cannot imagine new strategies. That does not mean that such a segment is completely unviable, it might simply be that it's not as profitable as that someone decided it should be, or requires more effort that that someone is willing to invest (money, time, creativity etc).
It might still be a perfectly viable lifestyle business for the people working there, who only want to make a decent living. Giving them a choice and a fighting chance, imho, is a win-win situation: the business offloads risk, knowledge is not dispersed, relationships are kept positive. At worst, the spin-off fails, the company has executed a cheap round of layoffs with no hard feelings; at best, the spin-off succeeds, they get some service for cheap and/or dividends, everybody is happy.
I'm surprised nobody said "well, the laid-off people can still do it themselves, nobody stops them" and that's absolutely true; but doing it in an organised manner, with support from an established "mother" entity, is much easier.
Say I switch to the cloud and don't really need most of my datacentre anymore. Instead of just chucking it all away, people and machines alike, I set them up as a separate hosting company where i'm a minority shareholder, buy from them a small contract for my little bit of legacy stuff, and let them free to go find new customers or do their thing. If they fail, nothing of value is lost and I still have access to their talent pool because no bridge was burnt; if they succeed, my shares are worth something and I keep getting good service for cheap.
In a way, it's similar to what Amazon did when they first introduced AWS: they had internal overcapacity for some services and just turned it into another business. (sure, it was a new system etc etc; but when you boil it down, it's just that: they had more internal resources than they needed, and rather than scaling them down, they started selling excess.)