Tom Warren is a Senior Correspondent and author of Notepad. Tom previously founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge. Tom also used to work as an enterprise project manager in a variety of investment banks, and has a background in IT and Windows engineering. Tom has appeared on CNN, CNN International, BBC News, Channel 4, MSNBC, TWiT, and many others over the years. You can reach Tom confidentially on Signal here.
Microsoft’s annual report reveals the company employed around 223,000 people as of June 30th. That’s 5,000 less than the 228,000 people employed in 2025. It’s the first time Microsoft has had a headcount reduction in 10 years, after the gutting of the Nokia phone business in 2015 and 2016. The reduction comes as Microsoft has laid off more than 9,000 employees over the past year.
[Microsoft]
Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet has been “cooking up retro vibes” as part of Microsoft’s new Xbox Labs effort. The result is what looks like a vibecoded option to pick your dashboard on an Xbox console. This is simply an experiment right now and it’s not clear if we’ll ever see such an option, but Xbox CEO Asha Sharma asks “blades on the web. Do we like this experiment?”
