Google lays off 0.05% in a restructuring. Is that really "the scoop" and newsworthy?
Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6. It's arguably one of the most important parts of the software stack. But, it's late stage mature code. Netflix had 4-6 people working on TCP flow control. Google had a small team, based in Japan, doing IPv6 for android. If a team has 100+ members and they can go, it poses "wow, at scale, how many people do you need to do things" questions when things as mission-critical as the entire IP stack can be done by less than 10 people.
Maybe I'm in an odd corner, but I find this thing fascinating. When they laid off the adsense sales and support staff because AI can do it cheaper, I found that fascinating too.
(I don't work for Apple, Google or Netflix, and my numbers are approximate based on bar conversations with some of the people in each team in each company. Consider them Fermi numbers)
The TCP/IP stack is extremely well defined and covers a finite problem space.
Products higher up the software stack tend to balloon in complexity as they reach into concrete use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of overweight teams, but most products can’t survive with 4-6 people.
Err, yes - that’s what 98% of modern TCP/IP development work is. There aren’t frequent new RFCs for TCP - it is established, standardized, and stable.
Non-technical stuff is crazy complex compared to purely technical stuff, which tends to be a lot better defined.
Do you know who they are and how to reach them? I have filed 3 or 4 bugs with proper reproducers through Apple's feedback assistant over the years and till this day those issues haven't even received a single comment nor any acknowledgement that the report has been read.
edit: added the stuff within brackets
I'm interested to see how this works out in the mid-longer term to see where it tracks on the graph with "Cheaper" on one axis and "Better" on the other (where '0' is in the centre of the "Better" axis, not at the bottom/left).
Capex tasks can be considered to be either "Cheaper" (as they're investments, not expenses) or "Better", since they create long term value on top of the short term, depending on how you want to define your axes.
When doing this budgeting, moving items from opex to capex in this way is mostly based on belief structures, as it's too early to tell if the capex generates lasting value or not. Short term, though, it tends to be good for the stock price regardless.
And so the pendulum swings.