Lay-offs aren't necessarily a sign of failure or bad strategy, so your logic does not compute.
Lay-offs happen for all sorts of reasons. It may be very reasonable to have X number of people one year, but changed market conditions, or financing rates, or whatever else mean it no longer does the next year.
People don't have magic crystal balls. But even if they did, it may still make sense to hire people while financing such a thing is cheap, and to lay those same people off when it isn't any more. Make hay while the sun shines, and all that.
You may not like the fact, but getting rid of poor performers makes businesses stronger and better. Rounds of lay-offs undeniably make such decisions easier to make and justify in large companies.
CEOs who do the same (or more) with fewer resources are generally rewarded. As a shareholder in the company you'd want them to do more with less and make you more value, right?
You might as well argue that any CEO who needs to hire more people has failed. That sounds obviously silly, but it's genuinely an almost equivalent argument.
All of this may not be pleasant for those involved and especially those who are losing their jobs, but that's capitalism for you. Big business doesn't tend to optimise for people's feelings - it cares more about the bottom line and being competitive.
In this case there is an obvious and pressing need. The streaming music scene may be a tremendously complex place to operate a business in, with all it's licensing and labels and countless jurisdictions and legal complexities, but both Apple and Google are sitting there ready to eat Spotify's lunch if they can't figure out profitability.
Lay-offs happen for all sorts of reasons. It may be very reasonable to have X number of people one year, but changed market conditions, or financing rates, or whatever else mean it no longer does the next year.
People don't have magic crystal balls. But even if they did, it may still make sense to hire people while financing such a thing is cheap, and to lay those same people off when it isn't any more. Make hay while the sun shines, and all that.
You may not like the fact, but getting rid of poor performers makes businesses stronger and better. Rounds of lay-offs undeniably make such decisions easier to make and justify in large companies.
CEOs who do the same (or more) with fewer resources are generally rewarded. As a shareholder in the company you'd want them to do more with less and make you more value, right?
You might as well argue that any CEO who needs to hire more people has failed. That sounds obviously silly, but it's genuinely an almost equivalent argument.
All of this may not be pleasant for those involved and especially those who are losing their jobs, but that's capitalism for you. Big business doesn't tend to optimise for people's feelings - it cares more about the bottom line and being competitive.
In this case there is an obvious and pressing need. The streaming music scene may be a tremendously complex place to operate a business in, with all it's licensing and labels and countless jurisdictions and legal complexities, but both Apple and Google are sitting there ready to eat Spotify's lunch if they can't figure out profitability.