That's how startups work pre-acquisition. Your acquisition price is dependent in part on how "large" the company is, that is, how many employees you have. So the companies start out small, hiring only the folks who know what they're doing, but as time progresses and they start thinking about selling themselves, they hire a bunch of people who have no clue whatsoever, just to pad the numbers. Surely a 500-person company is worth more to the acquirer than a 50 person one, even if those people just slow the core team down to a crawl. Or at least that's the idea. MS itself isn't really a paragon of productivity, so the visible improvement in productivity is quite telling.
