Why would Google even take the risk of this PR, vs. just moving these people into R&D inside the Cloud group? I feel like this clickbait headline will frighten markets more than the bloated headcount expense.
You're assuming it's R&D folks, I've seen one person tweet that it happened to them and they were in marketing.
Amazon lets people go regularly, I don't get what the issue is.
Google has recently had a leak about potentially cutting cloud. Afaik Amazon hasn't.
But isn't Cloud their biggest growth opportunity ?
Amazon doesn't have a reputation for shutting down projects, and no one has any reason to doubt Amazon's long term ability to execute on a cloud platform.