In the spirit of Microsoft deepening its investment in OpenAI, I created this poem in collaboration with ChatGPT:
Tech giants stood tall, like mighty oaks
But economic winds, they did provoke
A tempest fierce, a hurricane’s might
Brought job cuts, a dire and frightening sight
Satya and Sundar, leaders of the land
Said the future looked uncertain, a shifting sand
Clouds on the horizon, dark and low
Their firms’ growth, now ebbing to and fro
Amazon, Wayfair, also in the fray
E-commerce spending, blown away
Twitter, Unity, Spotify too
All with layoffs, what will they do?
It’s a storm of uncertainty, that we see
The future’s unclear, where will it be?
Will the tech industry find calm once more
Or will the economic hurricane roar?
Layoffs at Alphabet, Spotify, Unity & Twitter point to greater-than-expected deceleration in ad tech spending
“Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth. To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.” – Sundar Pichai, CEO, Alphabet, January 20
“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.” – Daniel Elk, Spotify’s founder & CEO, January 23