Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)
I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.
Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.
