> "Financial envelope"? You don't literally keep all of Microsoft's cash in a big envelope, do you?
Why is he deriding the usage of the word "envelope" in this context? Doesn't "envelope" just mean the range of allowed values of some operational parameter? Somehow, it makes total sense to me. I'd be very surprised if engineers at MSFT didn't understand it.
Stephen Elop: the same guy who wrote the "burning platform" memo about Nokia.
Ars Technica wrote a similarly scathing article [0] -- in more detail, really -- about the mail that Satya sent out. The focus of Ars's article, though, is a little more at the industry, and a little less at Microsoft: in their discussion, they really complain that this sort of thing is standard practice, and use Satya's mail to make a point.
I think I prefer their perspective over NYMag's Buzzfeed-esque approach...
[0] http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/07/op-ed-microsoft-layoff-...