Shoot! I was planning to buy the stock soon.
Say what you will about the crappiness of the product and the dark patterns, but it was a great stock to buy and probably the only social network with a diverse split in revenues (excluding Facebook - they use acquisitions to diversify revenue but nothing has been monitized yet)
Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
291–300 of 859 posts
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#292Link to the press release: http://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-li...
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I had LinkedIn on my list of undervalued tech stocks, and I think this bears that out. LinkedIn has absolutely no competition. LinkedIn is the world's biggest, virtually-complete graph of most enterprise organizational charts / structures. That alone will be valuable for Microsoft's enterprise business.
MS could, erm, look up those org charts on linkedin.com for $0 (indeed very useful at times.) What value is added by buying LinkedIn for $26G? How owning LinkedIn is going to add $1-1.5B/year (assuming eventually you want a P/E between, I dunno, 15 and 25), to MS's revenue? (I'm sure someone at MS has an answer to this, it's just that they haven't been tremendously successful in the past with their big acquisitions;…
> MS could look up those org charts
That's the best remark in the whole thread. Employee poking at competitors. Sales teams looking up the right people to connect with. Thanks to the LinkedIn share button, like Facebook, they can have parts of your browsing history. I don't even know whether the purchase should be allowed.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it was more like: - Microsoft has the money - LinkedIn is the biggest thing in recruiting (I don't especially like it either, but it is). I wouldn't personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recomendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn. - Microsoft makes business tools - There's a bunch of interesting opportunities for intrgating Dynamics, Yammer, and other MS…
> I wouldn't personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recomendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn. I'm a recruiter, and fully understand reluctance to use recruiters (expensive, not to mention a host of other reputation issues). I don't quite understand "I would't hire someone via...LinkedIn". 'Hire someone via LinkedIn' could mean a host of things. The most obvious w…
Well yeah, I think we're agreed. We might not use recruiters, but LinkedIn still helps us maintain business connections.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it was more like: - Microsoft has the money - LinkedIn is the biggest thing in recruiting (I don't especially like it either, but it is). I wouldn't personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recomendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn. - Microsoft makes business tools - There's a bunch of interesting opportunities for intrgating Dynamics, Yammer, and other MS…
Put the Yammer product folks on LinkedIn and clean up the LinkedIn web and mobile products.
I'm still not sure what purpose Yammer serves. It's basically business-y old-UI Facebook, as far as I can see. But I've never understood any of that range of products - Lotus Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, etc, etc. They feel like solutions in search of a problem.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just isn't true. There's nothing about LinkedIn that makes it any more indispensable than those sites or Monster.com or any other site popular with recruiters in the past. This is going to go down in history as one of the most overpriced, worst acquisitions of all time. LinkedIn has already become more associated with being spammy than with any positive connotations.
I take it you don't work in enterprise ? It's terribly popular and I would imagine if you're over 40 then you may well be spending more time on it than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat combined. Given Microsoft is trying to double down on the corporate space it is a pretty smart buy. Being about to push Azure/Office 365 through it could be invaluable.
I'm not currently in enterprise but I've worked at Ford and U of Mich. before so I have experience in that space. Thing do tend to get entrenched in enterprise space more so than in smaller businesses, but even still LinkedIn doesn't have any tentacles that make it irreplaceable. When the next thing comes along, enterprise users will be slower to switch off LinkedIn, but they will do so.
If Microsoft had paid a lot less I could maybe see this purchase being more logical, but at $26 billion I just cannot agree this is a smart buy on any level.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#297What is Microsoft hoping to gain from this?
Skype for business button on LI profiles. More stickiness for o365.
Data for Dynamics. People assume CRM here, and I tend to agree, but I wouldn't discount the ERP/supply-chain management software play. Microsoft seems to be more interested in manufacturing than marketing.
Slide share integration for PowerPoint/O365. More stickiness.
Lynda.com - increasing developer pool for C#/Xamarin, which in turn means more stickiness for Visual Studio, Azure, Windows and SQL Server, Dynamics families, SharePoint.
Lynda.com - increasing user base for productivity software.
Lynda.com - future play for HR training both content and technology.
A truckload of content.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#298I hope this will usher in an era of less unethical behaviour from the company under new leadership. Congratulations to shareholders. Anyone know why they'd negotiate an all cash settlement?
> I hope this will usher in an era of less unethical behaviour from the company under new leadership. /s ?
Not sarcasm, I'm thinking MS purchases the company knowing what its issues (or perceived) are. I see MS as the lesser of 2 evils, a company I can generally trust with my data.
The 'Dark Patterns' that LNKD employs would hurt the rest of MS, so this less unethical behaviour would be as that result.
Also helps that LNKD will be consolidated with MS in future, so maybe less pressure on the bottom-line as they'll be a part of the MS group instead of shareholders expecting certain EPS from them.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#299Great move. IMO this is Microsoft making a play for HR managed services -- look for them to sign a big deal with ADP / BenefitsExpress / buy someone like Zenefits to complement this purchase. The power and value of LinkedIn is as a recruiting platform; and recruiting is a big-money problem that's only getting worse. If they can turn LinkedIn into a benefits management platform, that would be a huge win for Microsoft and likely resonate with employees as well -- while giving Microsoft de-facto ownership of the supply chain for knowledge workers.
Microsoft is a traditional B2B company; they make boring enterprise software and sell it through traditional resellers. As more and more core business functions (like HR managed services) start being sold through these channels, it makes more and more sense for Microsoft to get into it. More importantly, Microsoft already has a sales relationship with nearly every company in the world -- and they can now cram a high-margin talent acquisition / management product down that sales pipe as well.
IMO this is one of those acquisitions that wouldn't have made sense for Apple, Google or Facebook -- their customer base is too consumer-centric. But given Microsoft's heavy enterprise sales base, it absolutely makes sense for them. Nadella has finally gotten Microsoft to realize it's not really competing with Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook -- its real competition is Oracle, Salesforce and IBM. Viewed through that lens, this is a great purchase.
Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B
#300Of course HN is mocking the deal like we know better without any form of analysis of the situation.