Hakan Ozturk

Folks, I left Microsoft three months ago to start my own company. Two weeks after I left, my whole team in Australia was let go. I see the hurt it’s causing my ex-colleagues, their families and their kids. Layoffs, forced relocations, PIPs. It’s brutal and I don’t want to brush past that. But here’s my honest take. Microsoft needs fewer people. I’ve been on the inside. I’ve seen how things get built. Lots of small orgs. Layers on layers. Silos everywhere. Here’s a real example. The Entra team shipped managed identities back in 2017. No more secrets in code. A clear security win. Then they tried to get the rest of Microsoft to adopt it. Very few teams did, and the ones that did moved at a snail’s pace. Every org had its own priorities and its own decision makers. It took Microsoft getting hacked, and the Secure Future Initiative that followed, before things really moved. Today almost every Microsoft app and service supports managed identity. Six years, and a major breach, to get there. In a world with agents and fewer people, that rollout would be possible across Microsoft in months, not years. Microsoft already has everything else. The customers. The infrastructure. The scale. What it needs is fewer people, leaning hard into agentic work. Right now OpenAI and Anthropic are shipping at a pace Microsoft can’t match. Microsoft has to change to survive.