Uh-oh!

Microsoft stuns with profit miss, job cuts
By Franklin Paul and Bill Rigby
Reuters
22 Jan 2009
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp stunned Wall Street with disappointing results that included plans to slash up to 5,000 jobs and a warning that profit and revenue will almost certainly drop over the next two quarters.

Looks like no one is immune from the W virus.

In my former job I never ceased to be amazed that the "best and the brightest" in the company insisted that continued growth was inevitable - and not just growth, but exponential growth.
What was particularly frustrating to me was that business planning was predicated on this assumption of "growth today, growth tomorrow, growth forever."
I got to participate in "very long-range" planning exercises, and would occasionally comment that, "There's always the possibility the company won't exist by the end of this horizon (~10 yrs out)."
This elicited a few chuckles; folks patted my head affectionately, then demanded that I revise my models to reflect more "realistic" (i.e., exponential) growth.

Sigh.