Great 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…
This would be great , if you're right, because this is how we get to a place where we maintain our resumé in one place (LinkedIn) and don't have to play the whole "Please upload your resumé. Now please enter in all the details of your resumé." hellhole.
I get messages through LinkedIn asking for my resume.
Also, why would it be great for a company to exclusively maintain your resume?
The comments here are hilarious, they really reveal the IT bubble. The only real complaint about this purchase would be that LinkedIn was overvalued. And I wouldn't bet on that since Microsoft surely sent a big team of their brightest cookies to make a valuation of the company. But other than that, LinkedIn fits: it is a corporate social network, if you will. I know that "corporate social network" is almost an oxymor…
Considering the Yammer failure, This purchase makes no sense whatsoever. Satya is flushing MS down the toilet.
Fortune 500 companies are replacing their entire physical phone systems with Skype.
For this role OCS worked better before Skype for Business. We had click-to-call, voicemail, forwarding configuration with Outlook integration. It worked great. Then we went to 365 and Skype, ostensibly as a cost saving measure, and now none of that works. Big step back. I mean seriously.
works perfectly for us, and I'm at a Fortune 5 company at the moment.
I'm surprised by the amount of negativity about the deal here on HN. It seems like an excellent match. I could see LinkedIn as an asset for Microsoft anywhere in the realms of work collaboration and HR. No other social network besides LinkedIn comes close to complimenting MicroSoft's wheelhouse of enterprise utility.
> I'm surprised by the amount of negativity about the deal here on HN price tag + whether it really makes sense for MS. Everybody remembers the Nokia fiasco.
Plus nobody likes Microsoft or linked in. Microsoft makes stuff you only use because you're paid to, and LinkedIn is something you use because of its ubiquity and despite the phone calls you're going to receive at work by desperate recruiters.
Great 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…
This would be great , if you're right, because this is how we get to a place where we maintain our resumé in one place (LinkedIn) and don't have to play the whole "Please upload your resumé. Now please enter in all the details of your resumé." hellhole.
There is a Fortune 200 headquartered in my area that, by far, has the worst application process and software I've ever seen. Aside from REQUIRING you to type in information like your high school's address and your high school GPA, they also have pre-screening booby-traps which you may need to lie to get past (e.g. my wife was applying for an HR job there and they asked if she had a bachelor's degree in HR, which she didn't, she has a JD and has worked in HR for years and she was filtered out of the applicant pool because of that). One of the last pieces of the process is answering a few long-form answers on why you'd be a good fit. They have four or five questions but the gotcha is if you lose focus on the textfield and have to click it again, it erases your answer.
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.
Yeah, its spammy, but spam from a single source is pretty easy to manage. As a consultant and writer it would be much more difficult to do my job without the ubiquitous ability to contact people at other companies easily. I'm not saying its the best, but when the alternative is nothing at all, I can't really fault it for doing what it needs to to make money. Also of note, a 25% reduction in sales and marketing expens…
I love the common assumption that you can just stop all sales and marketing activity and nothing will happen. LinkedIn makes its money from selling $80k enterprise contracts for Premium. They don't write themselves.
- Better integration of Dynamics CRM with LinkedIn
- A move towards social selling with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Enriched LinkedIn news-feed with updates from work life (example: meetings, projects)
- Better Cortana (personal assistant) that can help you professionally
- Integration of Office suite with LinkedIn learning
- Usage of Bing for professional search
Actually there hasn't been enough talk about the companies LinkedIn acquired. Connectifier - recruiting intelligence Lynda - online learning FlipTop - predictive marketing RunHop - personalised content Refresh.io - relationship content surfacing These could be huge additions to Azure, Office 365, Bing, Cortana etc.
As far as I know, Microsoft owns Pluralsight. They also recently bought Digital Tutors. Perhaps another big merge will happen between Pluralsight and Lynda.
The comments here are hilarious, they really reveal the IT bubble. The only real complaint about this purchase would be that LinkedIn was overvalued. And I wouldn't bet on that since Microsoft surely sent a big team of their brightest cookies to make a valuation of the company. But other than that, LinkedIn fits: it is a corporate social network, if you will. I know that "corporate social network" is almost an oxymor…
does anyone actually interact on LinkedIn? I thought it was just a platform for recruitment spam
I get most of my gigs through contacts on linked-in.
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;…
It seems to be one of those deals where the deal-makers (i.e. the finance professionals and lawyers involved in the deal) are doing it for the fees they stand to earn from it. A bunch of nameless faceless people who will never be held responsible for the deal.