The company has been taking heat recently due to its AI initiatives with Copilot, plus their 2025 layoffs which totaled around 15,000 personnel (while raking in record profits). I ended up selling all of my MSFT after those 2025 layoffs were announced.

Similar to Meta’s recent layoffs as a result of AI, this initiative is part of Microsoft’s strategy with managing costs while increasing their investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure (capital expenditure for data centers). In this case, Microsoft is offering an early retirement buyout of which the details are yet to be disclosed.

Microsoft’s standard severance package included at least 12 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of employment (position and tenure could vary that period). Six months of health benefits and the vesting of employee stock options was also offered to benefits eligible employees in previous reductions in force in 2023 and 2025.

Considering the companies recent record revenues/profits, offering some of that as incentives on top of their standard severance, comes across at least looking/sounding better in terms of PR. But if not enough take this offer, the company will still move through with actual layoffs to get the headcount to where they want it to be.

The term “slop” has been widely used to describe much of the AI generated material that has been posted on various social media sites (AI slop). I either have deactivated or deleted accounts but a really quick look shows these AI generated cat videos on Instagram and all kinds of garbage on Twitter/X (lot of it generated by requests to Grok). As for Microsoft and Microslop, back in January, CEO Satya Nadella posted an year ending update regarding where the company was heading to in 2026. As part of that post (which Windows Central highlighted), he wrote “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication“. And that was enough to get the Microslop meme (which was more or less contained) to go mainstream and trend all over social media where that label has stuck to the company as it double downed on pushing Copilot into every part of Windows 11.

What didn’t help Microsoft’s eroding reputation was a series of buggy updates for Windows 11 25H2 over the past few months where some naturally equated this slide to Microsoft using vibe coding given their AI push (some of this bolstered by recent reduction in force moves by the company). On my gaming PC, I’m still on Windows 11 Pro 24H2 and after hearing about all of the buggy releases, paused updates anyway. Yes, I know about the security mantra of being outdated (I take ownership of that even though I’ve been personally doing this for a while). But I digress.

The Microslop term while derogatory as far as Microsoft is concerned, is well deserved (the way they’ve gone all in isn’t really “micro” at all though… it’s more like “macroslop” level. When company executives believe something like Copilot should exist in apps like Paint and Notepad, and where your insistence is that users should have an online Microsoft account while making it extremely difficult for the average user from creating a local user account and then some of your apps fail to launch because of this necessity for an online account (this actually happened to users with one of these faulty updates), you begin breaking the trust and goodwill that once existed.

For a time in the last half of 2025, jumping on this AI bandwagon propelled Microsoft’s market capitalization to over $4 trillion. Wall Street’s narrative of AI is pretty much pump and dump territory stuff, pushing companies to adopt and push out AI wherever is actually about automation replacing expensive human workers where it’s about reducing expenses on the balance sheet in this “profit/revenue growth at all costs mentality”. I ended up dumping all of my MSFT last summer because of this company firing spree amidst record revenues/profits.

Generally speaking, this consumer driven backlash against this excessive deployment of AI (where a much smaller percentage of users are actually using something like Copilot in Windows), is what is needed. Wall Street knows it is a massive bubble (coupled with the crypto bubble) and are just riding that trend without caring how regular people will get hurt should it all collapse like the internet dot com one. Many of these corporate executives may also not really understand they are mortgaging the future by firing experienced personnel in favor of AI agents that can be GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) ones. In the case of Microsoft, they are having to do an equivalent of “cleanup in aisle 11” to fix whatever their AI “Microslop” agents created.