Fresh from a layoff bloodbath that cost over 2,500 jobs, Microsoft is already thinking about dropping the big bucks on more acquisitions

Monopoly

Stock market.

That’s because employees are seen as a liability, while holdings are seen as value.

Basically, employees need to be paid, so having a lot of employees hurts your company value. But owning immaterial things helps company value, because you don’t need to pay for ideas beyond the initial investment.

So headlines like these are common any time a company is looking to boost their stock. Lay off a bunch of employees to reduce cash out, use that freshly gained cash to buy intellectual properties (or buy the companies that own that IP) and then sit on the IP because actually using it would require employees like the ones you just laid off. You don’t care about actually leveraging the IP, because simply owning it is what gives you the value bump. You’re not worried about income from those IPs yet, because you’re just trying to make the company larger with the existing cash you have access to.

Things are about to get a whole lot less regulated too. I hope you like poison in your drinking water!

Even so any progress the government made is going to evaporate days after the Orange Idiot takes office

Microsoft sees Sony with many in-house developers who create AAA hype and profit, like Naughty Dog or Guerilla Games, and they want the same. But instead of growing their own teams, like Sony did, they are buying any reasonably sized developer with the hope that the purchase doesn't affect the final product. Microsoft has been very hands off with the studios that it buys, except Bethesda because Todd needs a babysitter, which reflects this approach of owning but not controlling the studio.

Microsoft doesn't seem to think that firing the people who make the games we love, like Tango Softworks and Arkane, will cause any harm to their brand because they are the monolith Microsoft.

They break the conditions and pay a fine a fraction of the size of the acquisition itself.

Regulation? In the US?

Not in this timeline.

I recently found out Nokia required Nokia phones. so we've got that going for us, which is nice.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used open standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Microsoft sucks but the phrase doesn't really apply to company acquisitions

They unfortunately forgot the second step and went straight the extinguish.