Can they? In my experience, they don't tend to do this when it comes to deciding who to lay off. I assumed this was because they can't tell who the bottom 10-15% are.

Team members can tell, but can upper management?

How do you even know that?

Usually the only way that you will see that, as a customer, is when the people who left are unable to keep up with all the firefighting and things ultimately explode. Either with outages or a security breach.

You can accumulate a _lot_ of tech debt before customers notice. For smaller companies, that's often a fatal amount of debt.

If you decide to stop paying your water bill you don't lose service that same day. Typically these layoffs either cause or are a sign of stagnation and then some scrappy startup starts eating away at your market share.

I can bet that if you bring Google Reader up, you'll get a lot more complaining - than any "horrible Google services" topic.