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Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

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181–190 of 859 posts

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#181
post #141

The fact is, Microsoft needed a content ecosystem. Buying LinkedIn gives it a lot of content AND a huge stake in the recruitment game which is a huge and growing market. The deal makes sense.

Bing/Cortana could benefit immensely having access to all of the LinkedIn content.

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#182
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think googling was part of the joke

I didn't even catch it. That's how much googling has become a part of the language. It's been Kleenexed.

Btw: A few years ago Microsoft paid for product placement in television series to counter "google it". It is amazingly awkward and sounds like from a strange parallel universe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#183
post #80
post #11

Oh, I can just imagine how the process went at MS: * Exec A: Social things are Good (coming to the conclusion about 10 years too late) * Exec B: Shall we create our own Google+? * Exec C: No, that didn't turn out that well for Google. Let's buy something existing. * Exec B: Ok, I've Googled a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by list price, but really we'll need to come up with a strat…

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…

Exactly. Integration of LinkedIn data with Dynamics and Yammer would be huge.

Imagine this scenario:

- User is logged in to LinkedIn

- User visits your website

- Their visit is logged by some JS to Dynamics CRM

- A record is created/updated in Dynamics CRM, populated with their name, job title and contact details from LinkedIn

Further down the line, I can see LinkedIn fully becoming part of Office 365.

This isn't Microsoft's attempt to get into the social networking game. This is Microsoft wanting accurate data to augment their enterprise collaboration/digital workplace platform.

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#184
post #80

Earlier 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…

>Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn. This. This the only reason im excited about the acquisition. LinkedIn UX is awful. What makes me nervous though, is some things could get worse. (skype has gone downhill ever since the acquisition i feel).

> This. This the only reason im excited about the acquisition. LinkedIn UX is awful.

Yeah well they acquired Skype and see what a mess that became. Even Windows itself sometimes...

I suppose it depends on which team gets the job?

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#185
post #136

I'm not sure what Microsoft is getting with LinkedIn for $26bn. I know it is a little crazy, but I think they would have been better off buying Redhat for $15bn or Canonical (Ubuntu linux) for even cheaper.

That would attract truly unprecedented levels of hostility and a declaration of war by segments of the Linux community.

Probably. On the other hand, Redhat kind of pulled up the drawbridge and focused on parts of the market that don't care so much with the RHEL / Fedora change. Of the major Linux distributions, I think Redhat is the one whose userbase would be least likely to be upset.

A few years back it'd have been totally unthinkable, but today, given that MSFT has surprised repeatedly with a more friendly approach towards the open source community, and given that Redhat - while still contributing a lot - has pulled back in a sense, it would be less problematic.

Wouldn't be trivial to pull off, by any means, though. I think if MS would like to pick up a major Linux vendor, they'd better spend a year and lots of money buttering up the community with more open source releases and PR first.

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#187
post #150

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…

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.

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#189
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsure if you're being serious... don't need to look much further than Windows 10 auto update to see how much Microsoft care...

Microsoft employs fifty thousand engineers. A group of them fucked up with that Windows 10 debacle. I reckon on the whole Microsoft very much do care about their reputation.

Or they could just not change anything and the majority of people won't associate the antipatterns with the Microsoft brand a tall

Re: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

#190
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unsure if you're being serious... don't need to look much further than Windows 10 auto update to see how much Microsoft care...

Microsoft employs fifty thousand engineers. A group of them fucked up with that Windows 10 debacle. I reckon on the whole Microsoft very much do care about their reputation.

So you're arguing that it was just "a rogue employee" that made that decision and executed it?
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