This will be a rant, but a rant with roots in the belief that employee experience fosters customer experience. As it should be well-known by now, Microsoft fired around 9,000 employees in July, after doing some smaller layoff rounds already in 2025, totaling more than 15,000 employees according to the TechCrunch comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs . This continues a trend from 2023 and 2024 . Now, I get it. Companies need to be and stay profitable, reorganize and, if needed, lay off employees. As such, there is nothing wrong with this. Where things start to get wrong is when at the same time two other things can be observed: strong and successful growth in revenues as well as profits, and very generous payments to the C-suite. Microsoft is immensely successful. For a long time now, we see record revenue and profits every quarter, which means strong growth. Looking at the most recent Q4/25 numbers , this is poised to continue and made Microsoft the second $4 trillion company after ...
The news On July 17, 2025 Zoho launched Zia LLM and deepened its AI portfolio with agents, an agent builder, MCP support and an agent marketplace. Key announcements from the press release include: In-House LLM : Zoho has developed its own large language model, Zia LLM, which comes in three sizes (1.3B, 2.6B, and 7B parameters) to optimize for different business use cases. This allows customers to leverage AI while keeping their data within Zoho's ecosystem, ensuring privacy. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. Speech-to-Text Models : The company also unveiled two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for English and Hindi, with plans to support more languages in the future. Prebuilt AI Agents : To facilitate immediate adoption, Zoho has introduced a range of AI age...