Comment by siliconviking

I'm surprised people aren't connecting all these layoffs with their root cause: the increasing cost of capital. Naturally, projects that were economically profitable only at a very low cost of capital could turn unprofitable at a higher cost of capital, destroying value instead of creating value. Shifting resources away from such projects is the logical thing to do, but if you end up with a surplus of resources, the only other possibility is to trim those resources. Discussions about how much cash Google has on hand are completely irrelevant in my view.