> their earnings and profits are both up by double digit

To be more specific, their adjusted non-GAAP profits are higher than expected. By GAAP measures they posted a loss for the previous quarter.

Fair but I’m going by the first thing their CEO told investors:

> “For the full year we delivered $31.4 billion in revenue, up 18% year-over-year, or 22% in constant currency, one of the best performances of any enterprise software company our size,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce. “We closed FY23 with operating cash flow reaching $7.1 billion, up 19% year-over-year, the highest cash flow in our company’s history, and one of the highest cash flows of any enterprise software company our size.”

> This is businesses reacting to activist investors and trying to quash workers asking for better compensation.

I feel like you're saying this with a negative connotation. Isn't that what the business is supposed to do? Run more efficiently, cut excess bureaucracy, make more profits?

That’s a bit too simplified, though, bordering on the shareholder value fallacy. Efficiency isn’t an objective fact in most cases and reasonable people can disagree about whether something has benefits on a different timeframe (e.g. R&D) or which are hard to quantify (cutting support & customer relations often seems like a pure win at first). Some shareholders thought Apple wasted too much money developing personal music players and should stick to computers, and listening to them would have cancelled the iPod and never reached the iPhone.

Given that they are reporting solid profits on very large revenue volumes, I don’t think you can make the case that this was a financial necessity and the scale is too large to have had much detailed thought going into it. (And “excess bureaucracy” is cut by sacking the C/VP-level managers who built it, not the rank and file implementing those policies.)

Inflation is up by double digits, too, so profits going up by double digits may just be running in place.

it seems a bit bizarre to me that a company like Salesforce would need 60k people though

Salesforce has a lot of subsidiaries including Slack, Tableau, Quip, Heroku, and MuleSoft.