If you are not aligned with Azure keep your eyes open. I have no insider info and this is all just my gut feeling but overall the shifts in the market and on the consumer/business side are tectonic. I feel there is a lot of layoffs coming in 2019, yet 2018 was stable but I do not see things as staying stable any more.
Again, just my gut...
it happened
I believe things just happened.
One big round must be coming with the departure of terry from Windows and a final cull as the whole business goes into sustain engineering. How many dev / pm does it need to do patching and critical security etc ?
Azure is not a big enough boat for that many heads. Indeed hosting 3rd party tech on servers shouldn't require that much dev ?