Why it matters
The company that sells Copilot is now rationing it internally. 404 Media counts Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian and Citi already throttling staff AI use, which makes cost discipline the industry default rather than a laggard's excuse.
Tokenmaxxing read
Watch which lever actually moved. Swapping the default to GPT-5.6 re-prices every internal request at once, while the guidelines admit no target spend value has been set yet. The memo is culture; the default is the control.
Source takeaway
Emanuel Maiberg reports this is not a cash squeeze: Microsoft's latest earnings beat Wall Street on revenue, operating income and net income. One employee, speaking unnamed, read it instead as a verdict on the economics of what Microsoft sells.
