Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B

news.microsoft.com

2,049 pointswhatok833 comments

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 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.

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?

A few reasons:

- There's one widely accessible database where resumes can be found. Since many people want to be found by prospective employers, this gives them an obvious place to put it.

- The resume format can be standardized, so you can focus on meaningful differences instead of the cognitive challenges of extracting meaning from a heavily stylized document.

- There can be a commonly available API for exposing this information e.g. in job applications (see "Apply with LinkedIn", which does exist).

- Because it's a centralized database, it's more up-to-date with professional developments and changes of contact information.

Not to say that it has to be a single company, let alone a linkedin-style company, maintaining all that infrastructure. But there is definitely value to a standardized infrastructure, and a company like LinkedIn seems to be a pretty successful way to build that.

There are just as many benefits to a standardized infrastructure as there are downfalls caused by adopting the wrong standard, by forcing people onto it, or by using it for too long.

Wasn't that what the whole LinkedIn "I vouch this person knows X" was supposed to be about?

I assumed that was basically for the purpose of ignoring your resume and selling recruiters a more accurate social graph backed summary of your skillet.

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.

Great story. It's a sure sign that a strong bureaucracy has set in when one sees this. It's common in government organizations, but becoming more common in non-government (especially large) organizations.

becoming more common in non-government (especially large) organizations.

Been like that for awhile. You're just getting to know more of the vast ocean of all the bureaucratic mindset that is out there.

I think it's a strategy by "those in power" to tightly control who gets hired. They make the application process so bad that people with options opt out of applying.

It's common on Craigslist amongst the spamming services [sic] like Resumator, Sourcery, etc. Furthermore, experience has taught me that any time I see a job ad on LinkedIn that says, "Apply on Company Website," I assume there will be a tedious form to fill out (not to mention account creation).

tech companies have done a really good job at stream lining the process. Most of them you just click on the job and click apply with an upload resume button and optional upload cover letter button.

I'm sorry if LinkedIn doesn't provide the analytics these companies desire, but LinkedIn already provides that functionality itself.

I'm pretty sure they have a "real" hiring channel that bypasses this; there's no way they could function if everyone had to go through that without error.

Those sorts of processes are great for requiring information with people might not be inclined to give if they had a real person they were conversing with, particularly past salary questions that only accept an integer value.

Let me guess-- they use Taleo?

This is much bigger than that. Linkedin has around 7k employees in the bay area, far more than Microsoft currently has down here.

This acquisition will transform Microsoft into a major bay area Employeer, with >10k people working in the region.

Why in the world does LinkedIn need 7k employees?

Sales.

My own view differs from the "benefits management platform" thinking. I don't think they want to do insurance or retirement benefits. I think they want you to use their productivity tools more frequently.

To me this is all about white collar productivity tools and integrations. LNKD is the keystone that manages a users journey as users ebb and flow through using (and not using) MSFT tools and products (Word, Excel, Sharepoint, Outlook, et. al.). The journey here is starting a job, starting projects, managing and coordinating projects, completing projects, and looking for new jobs. MSFT has tools in all aspects of the lifecycle except for the time between jobs.

Therefore MSFT offering gets stronger because they can keep that relationship with you even if you leave your employer and LNKD relationship gets stronger because they gain the relationship when you're still content at your current employer. The possibilities here are really interesting from a MSFT perspective.

Here's MSFT's deck on the summary [1].

[1] https://ncmedia.azureedge.net/ncmedia/2016/06/msft_announce_...

They want you to do anything that drives SQL Enterprise sales. That drives all of Microsoft's stock value and profitability.

Oracle and Salesforce own database hungry spaces like HR, CRM, etc relative to Microsoft.

As a side bonus, they get to mine an incredibly rich collection of intelligence data linking millions of professionals to influencers. I know with my employer, access to the firehouse of LinkedIn data would help them identify and cultivate relationships with future influencers whom their sales teams know zippo about.

I think you're very right. The acquisition would only make sense for a b2b company. This gives Microsoft the social network that's most relevant to their customer base. If they integrate it with the cloud Office suite, even better. LinkedIn will benefit from the Microsoft sales force.

I think Salesforce or IBM would be the other potential buyers, but perhaps LinkedIn would be too big for them to swallow.

This is IMO a big deal because MSFT will now own business identity. Linkedin will become your business ID regardless of which company you join. Owning identity that travels across companies is incredibly powerful. This is a huge upgrade to AD. It's provisioned, verified (socially) and serves as a huge data source.

Marvelous, even less incentive to join it then, my "personal ID" gets tracked over the web enough already.

> Oracle, Salesforce and IBM

Sorry to nitpick, but why isn't SAP ever mentioned in this same list? Believe it or not, but SAP does more than double that of SFDC for business software.

I'll take two guesses:

1. Oracle, Salesforce and IBM are all US companies, while SAP is German. That's not necessarily good or bad, but it would tend to be out of sight out of mind for this site's audience.

2. SAP is very insular, in a way that Oracle and IBM kind of try to be but aren't really.

", this is a great purchase."

You cant really say it's a great purchase without mentioning the price, which you didn't. I haven't done any deep analysis but my gut feeling says that 26.2B for stopping Linkedin spam is not worth it.

The price is high, but strategically Microsoft doesn't have a lot of options for new markets, and Microsoft's current markets are in decline so it needs to find new markets in order to grow. This purchase opens a huge market to them in the form of HR services, and that could easily turn into a $5-10 billion a year product for Microsoft within a decade. Everyone in the tech industry (MS included) is sitting on huge piles of cash right now, so valuations are high everywhere. It's a bit of a bubble, but it's more of a bubble driven by a lack of strong acquisition targets.

Nadella has finally given up chasing the consumer market -- this is a very good thing if you're a Microsoft shareholder. The company has never done well with consumers; Xbox is their lone success, and it took them a decade and a half to become profitable (and even then, it's tiny compared to their business products). The strength of the company is their enterprise sales organization, which they can use to drive new products to their existing customers. Google, Apple and Amazon don't have that; but Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, etc. do. Focusing on that is their only way to grow at this point.

HR managed services are certainly one big opportunity here as are leveraging Microsoft's B2B connections - however those are just the layer of utility services they can build over a massive 'corporate directory + network' and a feed. The opening up of that directory across companies could be huge and expand the potential competition to far more than just Oracle, Salesforce and IBM (to things like FB for Work, Slack etc.)

More thoughts on that here: https://medium.com/@ux/will-linkedin-and-microsofts-new-play...

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 agree, plus Slideshare can be a massive boost to Powerpoint.

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.

Yup and Rapportive too.

Don't know if Lynda is a particularly great platform for training but imho MS would be well advised to spend the pittance it would cost to develop high quality free training for all of its applications. Productive users of your tools is important, or should be.

You mean something like Microsoft Virtual Academy[1] or Channel9 [2]? Both are free, excellent learning resources on par with Lynda or Pluralsight.

[1] http://microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ [2] https://channel9.msdn.com/

As someone who has to suffer through lynda. it's a pretty good example of a terrible platform

As far as I know, Microsoft owns Pluralsight. They also recently bought Digital Tutors. Perhaps another big merge will happen between Pluralsight and Lynda.

Microsoft does not own Pluralsight (employee)

> Refresh.io - relationship content surfacing

First time I heard that. Wanted to check it out. Redirects to LinkedIn now. Acquisitions killing off the acquired products is a trend I do not enjoy.

Could of been LinkedIn who did it, they might of wanted to integrate the service into LinkedIn possibly?

I would assume so. It's still sad that these ideas keep getting killed off.

Wayback Machine shows the 301s start appearing in late 2015.

I had no idea LinkedIn owned these sites / services. Especially Lynda... Microsoft could do quite a bit with Lynda they could train programmers through that, maybe even make it more interactive? There's of course other things they could do to those other sites. I really hope they don't just pull the plug on some of them though.

Have you ever been on the ground floor of a synergistic acquisition? In theory it should be easy to integrate data sources and reap the benefits. In practice what happens are year long efforts and organizational re-structurings every 3-6 months depending on what the cadence is with the end result being people being shuffled around and no benefits being reaped.

The restructuring is a huge part of it. Like Game of Thrones: Corporate Edition. Everyone is fighting to keep their job and use the opportunity to climb the ladder, and ensure their pet projects remain competitive. There are MASSIVE political interests from all levels and they can often eclipse the focus on actual integration and joining forces.

This is absolutely the case. Having been through my share of re-orgs due to M&As, another side-effect is that often some of the best talent leaves when things don't go quite the way they wanted.

Stuffs like these are going to be great boost for MS and its cloud initiative. Zenefit-esque product is next on the horizon.

And Lynda to developer and productivity tools.

Exactly! Linked In is the rolodex of the Internet on steroids. Microsoft just have to align it with the needs of their customers and they win.

Indeed. And even on the "buy a social network rather than build one", this is a great choice. Whether they like it or not, pretty much everyone already has LinkedIn.

It think the negativity is mostly due to the price tag. If I was a shareholder I would be furious over Microsoft paying $26billion for a money losing company. Even if Microsoft see some potential the rest of us aren't, and we have to assume that they are, they still need to find a way to turn a profit on the deal.

Given that they bought Nokia, only to shut it down, more or less, it would be reasonable for the shareholders to get a plan, detailing how LinkedIn will boost Microsofts business, with more that the $26 billion.

I think first thing to happen is lot of linked in employees getting fired. Since linked in employs a lot of people.

Guess where they'll be updating their resumes?

I wonder how much of the value was attributed to vanity metrics like the number of times people check the site? An inflated number since LinkedIn started using short term exploitation tactics like sending Notification Badges for your contacts' Birthdays and Work Anniversaries. Personally I also feel fleeced out of an outrageous monthly subscription that was sneaked through an undeclared AppStore transaction (I got >50% of the money back but not all). At this point I'm planning on deleting my account.

Can you talk more about this sneaked-in subscription? That's really concerning.

Did you consider suing? It's the only way to reach today's modern corporation.

Or you know, you could post it here and I bet you can find someone who works for the company.

Why? Dark patterns are intentional, you know. That's theft, as if they stole your wallet.

You don't accidentally bill people for a subscription service - and if you did you'd reverse it the instant you discovered it, not try to hide.

Save your righteous mercy for people who steal from you.

Yeah, even assuming Microsoft cuts losses and makes the company profitable again through some product integrations, it's still a huge price tag.

LinkedIn has stalled growth and brought in $2.9 billion in rev last year, which means that all things constant it will take nine years to cover the $26 B price tag.

Microsoft must really have some big plans for it to justify the costs.

That's not actually that bad, if that revenue were profit. Plugging it into a discounted cash flow calculator, this investment breaks even at a discount rate of 11%, which is much better than Microsoft could get elsewhere. At a discount rate of 3%, they'd only need to generate about $750M in profit to break even.

Problem is that revenue isn't profit, and LinkedIn is currently losing money, which makes their financial value negative. So Microsoft must be assuming one of three things:

1) LinkedIn will continue to grow, enough to raise revenues by a billion or so with minimal marginal expenditures.

2) They can cut costs enough to get to ~25% margins without losing market share.

3) There's strategic value when combined with Microsoft's existing business.

Any one of these seems like a reasonable (though far from guaranteed) bet.

Eh, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and figured they were valuating based on price/sales ratio, since earnings have been negative lately and that's probably the only way to come close to the 26B number.

With all things constant it will take a lot more than 9 years. The 2.9 billion in revenue doesn't account for the costs of running their business. Microsoft would need to make 26 billion in profit to cover the price tag.

Even more than that when considering the opportunity cost of not putting $26B into a stable investment vehicle.

> 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.

Unpopular opinion, but I like MS products - Just not the pricing! I did start in an MSSQL/.Net Devhouse though which may have tinted my rose glasses.

I hate Microsoft Project (never ever use the resource leveler) ... Visio was better when it was a core part of office - now I have to wonder whether the recipient of a diagram will be able to view it. Other than those two examples, I find that I can get work done in the Microsoft ecosystem.

This is like MS-Yammer at the scale of Google-Moto.

$26bn is a lot of shareholder money.

And MS have a terrible track record for acquisitions.

Per LinkedIn's Form 8-K [1], LinkedIn has agreed to pay Microsoft a $725 million break-up fee if (a) LinkedIn's Board of Directors withdraws its recommendation of the merger, (b) LinkedIn accepts a superior offer, or (c) LinkedIn's stockholders turn the merger down. Note that LinkedIn may terminate the merger without paying the break-up fee if it avoids announcing an acquisition within one year of so terminating [2].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/000110465916...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/000110465916...

I'm gonna take a wild guess here and say that LinkedIn isn't likely to torpedo the merger.

Is it normal to have the clause about the shareholders turning the merger down? Seems like one helluva way to ram it down shareholders throats without much option to say no.

That's why it's done.

As a shareholder I would find that kind of behaviour to have been the exact opposite of the kind of duty my mangers owe me. I'm surprised it's legal.

Unfortunately yes, it's pretty common. It's less than 3% of deal value though, so they don't lose the option to say no.

This is a fantastic move for Microsoft, and IMO, a premature throwing-in-the-towel moment for LinkedIn. At $26B, that's less than 10% of Facebook's market-cap. That's a steal for the world's biggest Social-Professional Network, and the medium through which most recruiting could conceivably happen in the future. Given that MS currently has no social presence at all, but has a fantastic enterprise sales channel, LinkedIn is a great asset for them.

The idea of going to physical career fairs in thousands of colleges around the country, and collecting/handing out paper resumes just to make the connections happen, always seemed like a woefully inefficient way of connecting job seekers with employers. In the future, this process is going to become more and more digital, and networks like LinkedIn are going to become vital hubs in this new wave. If Microsoft can find a way to accelerate and monetize this trend, this acquisition could well be one of the best deals of the decade.

MS does have a 1-2% stake in Facebook lest we forget

MS having a 2% stake in FB is like Yahoo buyings its stake in AliBaba. Yes, it's a great financial investment for MS and they are going to make a lot of money from it. But there's no way FB is going to allow itself to get integrated into MS core services, just because of a 2% stake.

LinkedIn at 10% of Facebook's cap is super over valued. It's pure spam. Everyone is suggesting Microsoft will improve, add features! It would have been better and cheaper to create from scratch. LinkedIn exists in a space that none of the big player care to enter seriously.

It would not have been cheaper to create from scratch, certainly not in a reasonable amount of time. You're truly underestimating just how sticky a product like LinkedIn really is.

Skype, Nokia, Minecraft, LinkedIn. Also Yahoo, almost, at one point.

Best of luck to Microsoft with its latest acquisition. It doesn't look that sensible though.

Does anyone have a reference to even some wild speculation as to what Microsoft gets out of for their own business? Or is this just somewhere to park some cash? I am honestly confused.

More connections to enterprise, potential for some cloud HR play, a ready-established pseudo social network to compete with Facebook for Work (maybe as part of a Yammer, Office365, Skype for Business play), st-tonne of user data, SlideShare...

I'm still confused.

If someone is shopping for a job on LinkedIn, do they want their employer to know that? Isn't there some risk of trust violation? Why would I want to take my online resume and hand it out around work?

I just don't get the synergy plays here. They all feel like a very expensive moonshot.

I connect with colleagues, even my manager when I was at my previous job, even though I found my current role on there. But, think about it from the current plays - they have the work connections (organic "company graph"), the user's skills, your current job details (think about both of those as being an HR play), a learning platform (Lynda, but think of that as internal training/cloud qualifications), industry/enterprise trend information (can dive into the data of all of the roles and build products based on predicting market requirements). Slap on Pulse and SlideShare as publishing and an established (and probably growing) revenue hose from Recruiter and it makes some sense.

If you are looking for a job you just send a private message to a bunch of recruiters or key decision makers e.g. managers. Your employer would never know.

It's not a moonshot at all. LinkedIn is a pretty well understood business.

Unless said employer is LinkedIn (or now MS). I wonder what sort of information they'll be leveraging without telling their employees.

You turn off profile updates.

I feel that over-focus on the interplay undermines core product. Power Point, RDP, Office. Outlook has significantly dropped in usability with introduction of 365. Overforced Win10 with Metro sandboxing undermines usability in many regards, dur to inability to link an action directly, but rather having to open a classic window. Microsoft forgets just how many their core products are used just because of RDP

But Office as a business unit is one of the cores, add in LinkedIn as another business unit - and they're building out the entire business systems ecosystem, end to end. Hiring (LinkedIn), HR (Office + LinkedIn), office productivity (Office), communications (Skype + Sharepoint, WP?), training (Lynda), infrastructure (Azure). Guessing next step will be another attempt at advertising/marketing platform. EDIT: forgot about Dynamics for that last one.

This article explains it pretty well: http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-microsoft-just-bought-linke...

Is Microsoft becoming the official "bad bank" for tech investments?

It's like Corel for B2B.

Skype is one of the more regrettable acquisitions. Linux support has been deplorable ever since.

I've always assumed that was part of the embrace-extend-extinguish - "look at this shitty OS, Skype doesn't even work on there; you should use Win X".

Skype already works on OS X (ahem, macOS) and Windows, arguably the only two desktop operating systems with a significant amount of users. It still works on those two operating systems. So what are they extinguishing? And also what are they even embracing? They bought it outright. I don't think EEE, which hasn't really been a MS thing since the 90's, is even the proper term for this at all.

At least it does work. Which of course Skype for Business completely doesn't, even in browsers (on Linux). Even then buying a Skype for Business account on Windows it's the most confusing mess as they assume that you're buying the full Office 365 suite and want to take over your email sending. Which contains this massive admin section that's basically empty and doesn't make much sense. So then you end up with some terrible user@blah.microsoftonline.com account which unless you pay for more than the basic package isn't an email address at all. So people still have to manually send you the link for any meeting that you are a part of. Then you have to do a real hunt to find the download for Skype for Business - cause they all assume you just bought the whole Office 365.

I also can't connect to any Skype for Business account via Skype on Linux - just for messaging. That does work for some people for my Skype account on Windows to connect to Skype for Business but half the people don't get my contact requests or they are never shown online.

Of course then there's Slack. Slack works everywhere. On top of that Slack (non-video) calls work almost everywhere except for the Firefox and Desktop apps on Linux.

From Mobile OS/Nokia to Business Chat/Skype, MS has a knack for have all right pieces at the right time and still missing big shifts in the industry.

I saw demos of Surface ( Now PixelSense ) almost a year before the first iPhone was announced. My company was using Skype back in 2006 to do what we do now with Slack. It's amazing how a top tech company can stay on top while consistently being so far behind the curve.

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.

> Linux support has been deplorable ever since.

That is probably a feature, not a bug ;-)

The whole thing has been deplorable since they un-P2P'd it. Terribly performance and call quality.

I think this one makes sense though. I don't know if it's worth the money, but it complements their business approach.

hows minecraft doing for microsoft?

It's consistently the top selling game they have over there, it's continuing to print money at a constant rate (compared to most games which tend to make most of their money around releases).

Merchandising is huge, I imagine its doing very well in that regard.

The biggest thing hampering LinkedIn's growth has been such a strong tech market. This is also why many HN readers are not familiar with it. When the market is strong, those with technology skills can find work in a few hours without using any platform.

But if the market dips, things like LinkedIn's recommendations will become useful and relevant. Less so for technology workers than for those with softer skills, but far more relevant than they are today.

LinkedIn is pretty big in the NYC startup scene because overall people are more ambitious in a career ambition way... Silicon Valley has more ambition to build cool things and so having a LinkedIn profile feels like wearing a suit and having one's teeth professionally whitened and going around formally shaking hands with people.

LinkedIn is also one of the few innovators in dark pattern UI research. Each week I get an invitation email accidentally sent by someone over 60 who signed up for LinkedIn and spammed his/her entire Gmail address book with invites.

I hope the acquisition isn't being driven by LinkedIn's lead-gen functionality, since that has been the main reason I've considered deleting my profile. Most of the people who attempt to connect are selling something, which reduces the platform's usefulness as a social network.

The best thing about the acquisition is that lots of that money will flow back into the startup ecosystem.

Not familiar with it? LinkedIn has been working their evil magic for so many years it's hard to imagine how you could be involved in the tech industry at all without having had to fend off at least a little bit of their bullshit. I am totally familiar with them, having ground my way through the process that eventually stops their relentless flow of content-free nag mail, and my feelings can be described in a single word: contempt.

Congrats to anyone who was holding LinkedIn stock. Microsoft's bid of $196 per share has LNKD up $63 bucks a share or 48% in premarket.

Edit: Also a cautionary tale for anyone shorting a stock that fundamentally sucks but could be a buyout target. Use options instead!

Perhaps congrats on the loss and write down if you bought above $196. Looks like LNKD traded north of $200 for a good portion of the last 2 years.

Ouch, I knew it took a big hit after dismal earnings and guidance last time (or two) but thought it had recovered a bit. Congrats on breaking even then I guess to anyone holding since Feb.

The calls on LNKD are looking pretty sweet http://i.imgur.com/EMdaiMO.png

$26 Billion is actually fair : The question is, would it provide earnings of $2.6 Billion per year discounted over the next ten years?

I think so.

Keep in mind, MS sells $90 billion of product and services a year, so we're talking less than 3% of that. (MS cost of revenue is about a third of revenues!)

1] First imagine LinkedIn used as the primary sales channel for MS products. Head of sales is probably salivating.

2] And then there is advertising. I think part of the reason LinkedIn is valuable is this: apart from LinkedIn there is no simple way (barring credit cards or other documents) to verify if an account who signs up to an online service is a real person, or who they claim to be. For an advertising business, this is gold: Expect the LinkedIn federated sign on to be integrated into many microsoft services (and by more third party services.)

Strategically if you are selling software/anything, you have are better off targeting the top 10% of earners rather than a gazillion broke teenagers.

Of course there are fake profiles on LinkedIn, but they are minor, and weeding them out is probably easier than on other platforms.

> $26 Billion is actually fair : The question is, would it provide earnings of $2.6 Billion per year discounted over the next ten years?

> Keep in mind, MS sells $90 billion of product and services a year, so we're talking less than 3% of that. (MS cost of revenue is about a third of revenues!)

30%

Annualized over 10 years. One of the ways you value a company is by discounting the future cashflows.

MS : "If you don't upgrade to Windows 10, we'll create a linkedin profile for you."

I wish people would read company's quarterly performance reports before making claims about whether we're in a bubble and whether company x is worth y. LinkedIn generates a ton of revenue and is very arguably worth its valuation. Just because you don't use LinkedIn or SnapChat or whatever else has a ridiculous valuation these days doesn't mean its valuation is not justified in some way.

The problem is that revenue is not profit. If expenses are greater than revenue and the trends don't show that changing soon (i.e. "default dead") then it is extremely hard to justify such a high valuation. There are the employees, the physical infrastructure, the code they've written, the brand name, and maybe the marketing value of the users, but granting a valuation based on consistently negative profit is somewhat silly.

That's debatable since many companies like Amazon are able to turn a profit by sacrificing growth. Good point though and this information is also available in quarterly earnings reports. The main argument I was making really is that people should take a look at some numbers before having such strong opinions. I believe last I checked LinkedIn was profitable.

LinkedIn is not profitable. They lose money every quarter. Revenue is around $800-900MM a quarter though.

I 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'm not so hopeful. Given that Microsoft pulled out every dark pattern in the book for Windows 10, I can only think things will get worse.

Just because one team on Windows 10 made a huge mistake doesn't mean the entirety of Microsoft is full of people looking to fill the world with dark patterns. They employ about 50,000 engineers last time I checked...

I don't think it was a "mistake" by an isolated team. I don't think the Windows team would change that fundamentally Microsoft's core product without the management's OK.

I agree that a manager somewhere in the organisation did OK this change but that's one person. I don't believe he or she is representative of the hundred thousand people that Microsoft employ.

I'd expect the aggressive data gathering and windows 10 upgrade practice to have been OK-ed at Microsoft's ExCo.

What makes you say that? Why do you think this is rogue employee behavior?

I'm having trouble parsing the concept of an "isolated team" at a company like Microsoft, especially where a major OS revision is involved.

You could say something very similar about LinkedIn itself, albeit on a slightly smaller scale.

If this would have been a mistake, the executives at Microsoft would have heard of it by now, no matter how disconnected they are from the world, and then they would have reverted it. Which they didn't.

Have you any idea how difficult it is to revert something like that? It doesn't sound like a trivial Cmd + Z to me. It sounds like a lot of work with limited upside for the team that implemented it. Nobody likes undoing their own work...

Anyway, I'm not saying it wasn't a dick move by Microsoft. I just don't think it's representative of their entire company.

It's pretty trivial: turn off the push messaging that makes it auto-update.

The forced updates definitely got CEO approval. No question.

I suspect you're wildly overestimating how much direct involvement the CEO of a medium or large company has on product development. Obviously this can depend strongly on each company's culture (Apple is one of the most extreme examples of CEO involvement) but very often CEOs are glorified managers, involved mostly in dealing with the strategic side of things, and that kind of decisions only reach the head of R&D or CTO at most.

This has been my experience from working in medium and large companies for the past decade at least.

A barrel of apples rots from the top down. No, wait, that's a fish.

Either way, their Windows 10 deployment strategy stinks.

So people can cash the fk out, baby! (If I could negotiate $26B in cash, I would.)

yeah you would! But why would MSFT accept a all cash deal. All they key employees holding the matured options mighy cash out and leave?

> I hope this will usher in an era of less unethical behaviour from the company under new leadership.

/s ?

I'm still wondering which company is which in that.

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.

I thought the 'less unethical' was the giveaway, as if you expect them to still be unethical.

With a culture as deeply infused with an utter lack of respect for user privacy, reputation or safety, I would expect them to be unethical in essentially all cases, short of, perhaps, a complete management purge.

Borrowed it cheap, makes for a fast close. Maybe looking to pad the MS revenue numbers later in the year due to less growth in cloud infrastructure. (Straight out of IBM playbook.)

"LinkedIn will retain its distinct brand, culture and independence" -- well that's a shame..

What a terrible time to be burning that much cash, just before the next recession, and on a resume site. I was starting to see some good things coming from Microsoft but this makes me shake my head and question leadership big time.

> just before the next recession

Citation needed.

This makes a ton of sense for everyone. LinkedIn is too small to be a dominant platform like Google or Facebook. If someone were to buy it, it would be someone with a strong enterprise presence, with an incomplete social footprint. It would also need to be a company with a high enough market cap to afford the purchase, and PE ratio for it to appear dilutive.

Who fits the profile?

- IBM - They are in share buyback mode, not major purchases

- Oracle - Social may not matter to them

- SAP - Too many issues from prior acquisitions

- HP - Splitting, but building

Microsoft is the ideal buyer.

The key is integration. Microsoft doesn't have a great history for integration, but that was also under the prior regime.

My take on this:

- 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

this pcworld article claims that better cortana is the key driver: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3083016/software-productivity...

Yes, me too.

The ability to automatically import contact's data into Dynamics, with integration directly into Skype for Business. One click call integration for all your customers!

Staff directory as a service? Maybe. Merged with Office 365 that might make sense.

Here's looking forward to my Hotmail account email address being accidentally 'shared' with LinkedIn and the never-ending LinkedIn spam returning.

What's interesting about this deal is what didn't happen 1. Google who is right next door and wants to make a dent in Cloud didn't go after them 2. LinkedIn who is a monopoly in this category- decided to give up trying to go its own- seems like they knew they topped out

Are you saying Google should've bought LinkedIn? How does that contribute to Google cloud platform?

Sorry. I meant Enterprise

A huge database which can be utilized for sales. Who to talk to with what profile, which kind of approach is likely to work, and so forth. A great opportunity for some data mining folks!

I am actually surprised there are no anti-trust kind of law that are kicking in. I guess this is just a case no one thought that would be an issue at some point (or is it really?).

Right, but 26 Billion! Something doesn't add up.

What I never get with these huge acquisitions is what about the user's privacy?

They never agreed with Microsoft to have their data but somehow ms automatically gets access to it?

Straight from the privacy policy: "If there is a change in control or sale of all or part of LinkedIn, we may share your information with a third party, who will have the right to use that information in line with this Privacy Policy." So not Microsoft specifically but they did agree LinkedIn could transfer their data to any buyer.

LinkedIn has a huge presence in the professional users and businesses. A large number of people from non-tech backgrounds never got onto LinkedIn because they never kew of it or didn't really bother to create a profile here.

Imagine integrating LinkedIn profiles with Microsoft's professional tools or even Windows. The reach of LinkedIn will be massive if Microsoft gives it a push through Windows.

It's likely that this boost does not necessarily convert into increasing revenue, but it can certainly boost the number of active users that LinkedIn has.

And I hope, now that it is acquired, LinkedIn will stop pushing us to spam all of our contacts about joining it, updating profiles or whatever.

" Will continue to operate independently ".

Why do they even say that. Microsoft didn't pay 20billion for a passive investment.

Such a silly thing to say.

And either way, as an MS and LI user, I want MS to meddle. I want them to fix the dumpster-fire that is LinkedIn. Nobody likes LinkedIn except recruiters.

It won't be fixed. If anything it will be worse...

LinkedIn owns Lynda, but Microsoft (MSDN) partnered with Pluralsight, interesting how that will play out.

Well both of those are underwhelming in terms of both content and user experience.

I've had no experience with Lynda but what's underwhelming about PS? It definitely seems to lack of depth in a lot of courses but provides a good overview/refresher on things in my experience.

As you mentioned lack of depth is the larger one, but also the rate at which they add new content is not exactly great. Lastly they tend to reuse the same author's for certain subjects which creates a lack of diversity in the teaching. These last two are common to both Lynda and Pluaralsight. At $25.00 and $30.00/month this is one of the highest priced subscription services on the internet and as such you would expect much more from them.

Yeah I'll admit I hadn't considered lack of instructor diversity. Subscription fees are thankfully paid for by my employer so it's not a huge issue for me personally but I could understand how that would be difficult to justify for individuals.

If you know of a better resource for software development training materials, please name it so I can make my employer pay for it.

Holy fuck that is a lot of money. How on earth is LinkedIn worth anywhere near that?!

Took the words out of my mouth.

I would like to second this thought! Even with ad money HOW?!?@?#? But on the other hand this does feel right, Linkedin does feel like the Microsoft of Social Networking.

"The Microsoft of Social Networking" Love it.

Unlike Snapchat or Instagram, which could very likely turn into MySpace 2.0 or 3.0, Linkedin is actually very entrenched in its market.

What market is exactly that? I still have no idea what Linkedin is all about.

Edit: Yes, keep downvoting me, asking questions about LinkedIn clearly doesn't add to the discussion. sigh

Recruiting. It's huge.

Also just B2B sales in general. Anything that makes getting in touch with decision makers easier is basically a money faucet.

And isn't Linkedin the only network who got people to pay subscriptions? That's extremely interesting for MS.

On demographics alone, though, the deal doesn't seem to make sense.

I read this in Trump's voice.

Recruiting on LinkedIn is huge. Very, very, very big. This is really a not dumb deal by Microsoft, believe me. I don't know but I've heard from hundreds of people who've told me this is a huge move. It will be amazing.

It seems like LinkedIn is more the butt of jokes now than in its heyday when everyone was advised to get on it. Heyday being 2011-ish? Or is there a large number of C-level type people who went to elite colleges and are SV VCs who use it a lot, who are just out of my social league?

I think it being the butt of jokes could be isolated to the tech crowd. You're not going to find much value and definitely be more critical of it if you aren't hurting for employment opportunities.

In my circles (software dev in europe) everyone is on LinkedIn and a LOT of recruiting goes through it. I don't like it at all, but it is the status quo for recruiting in many countries.

IT generally, yes. anything else - i have not met anybody who actually uses it. most/all have a basic, outdated profile, didn't log there for 3 years, and 0 activity. job search is done in other ways

I'm curious - what do people use now to find jobs? I'm still relying pretty heavily on LinkedIn for recruiters to contact me.

No, people at all levels in engineering and manufacturing use it. It's odd for me to search for a coworker or potential employer and not find them, although some just have an empty profile.

LinkedIn is Monster+Facebook on steroids.

LinkedIn is basically Facebook for white collar people.

It has a news feed, friends, events etc. But also has a jobs section. Given how ubiquitous it is every recruiter and sales guy is on there trying to push stuff.

Events is deeply broken though

I think Facebook is the Facebook for white collar people. I do know people who use Linkedin heavily, but it's a separate thing (personal vs professional networks).

Facebook for employees; not just recruiting, but sales and B2B generally.

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.

Being spammy -and- having its user database liberated at frequent intervals.

Well, regular users don't mind the spam as much and might not even know or realize the true impact of those account leaks.

Plus Microsoft is quite likely to take care of both problems. At least on the security front, since 2005 or so, I haven't heard of any leaks on their part.

This can only be my impression, however, given the amount of "LinkedIn trainers" people and given the amount of people that are willing to pay a LinkedIn trainer to enhance their profiles, I would not be that sure that there's nothing indispensable in LinkedIn.

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.

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 expense would have made it profitable this last quarter, so evidently there are plenty of ways it is adding value to others.

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.

clearly you know what you're talking about...</sarcasm>. One word: ads.

This is the most bizarre thing I've heard. People want Snapchat, Instagram. People have LinkedIn. No one wants it. It's a dinosaur. People using it actively just haven't realized it's dead already.

Well they did do $3 billion in revenue last year. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=LNKD+Income+Statement&annual

That valuation should be for more like $3B in profit!

Based on the Yahoo link it looks like they lost money this year and last.

Their net income is 0.6% of their valuation.

They loss money, right?

Revenue isn't really relevant when you're losing money as fast as Linkedin. They have no real competitors, and they still aren't able to turn a profit.

Even $3 billion is to much.

They're not losing money all that fast and are spending heavily on growth. They also have a lot of money in the bank ($3.1B in cash and short term securities) so that's pretty much exactly what it's there for.

With a $-166 million Net Income.

That's revenue. They made no profit for that year and actually ended up losing money.

As someone else pointed out, their revenue is pretty decent. But their biggest asset is likely key staff as well as, as social networks go, that it has the cleanest/most useful database of users.

There are far cheaper ways of getting LinkedIn's database!

SQL Injection?

LinkedIn is doing well man. Why Microsoft did this is another question.

Because they already own the "Office". They want you to integrate your Outlook\Exchange with Linked in.

An existing user base is priceless. In france, when you sell a shop, you also sell for the "fond de commerce", meaning that an existing list of client is part of the price.

You also have to consider that so many companies use linkedin. It's an industry standard for professional networking, which has a different meaning than networking with friend ("consumer" networking I guess ?).

I am surprised why people think that amount is outrageous. LinkedIn has so far been pathetic at everything except magically mantaining their monopoly of professional network but I believe it is far more valuable than it is now.

I am not sure what has held LinkedIn back these many years but it is certainly possible that the new leadership can push a lot of great changes to the platform.

Noob question: how can Microsoft buy LinkedIn given that large parts of it are owned buy random investors who might not want to sell?

What happens to someone who, lets say, bought $10k worth of LinkedIn stock two years ago and has no intention to sell. Will that person be forced to sell his stock?

Generally, the corporation's internal governing documents will specify the rules for sale, but the norm is a majority vote of the shareholders. Those who voted against may have some remedies if the firm was undervalued, but, yes, they can be forced to sell stock.

The remedies vary but in Delaware these disputes are heard in Delaware's Court of Chancery.

You can google for recent judgement in the (re?)purchase of Dell by Michael Dell. Chancellor ruled the stock was underpriced by the terms of the sale but the remedy is available only to those shareholders who sued not all.

Appraisal is a bizarre bit of corporate law to say the least.

Yes, if a majority of the votes from shareholders approve of a sale others will be forced to sell.

Follow up noob question: Do they buy all stock in public hands or just a part? How do they decide he is obligated to sell ?

I had been thinking recently about deleting my LinkedIn account. The question has just been settled.

It's a lot like dating. Today you can simply post a profile on a site/app, and algorithms can now match you. Your exposure is now hundreds or thousands of people (no matter your preferences). The happenstance of being in the right place at the right time is cut down so much, it's almost irrelevant. It's far more likely a great match will be on the 1 of 3 places single people go, within the last month. It makes better matches faster. It's a superior way to date.

Without being on LinkedIn, you're now relying on only the network you've built to date. Unfortunately, LinkedIn is not as efficient as OkCupid, but it's where everyone is, and it's the best place to find a career match. Saying you're going to delete your LinkedIn account is a lot like saying "eh, I'm just going to grab drinks at the bar until I meet the right person"

Personally, I never had any decent job offers from linkedin. Everything has been lukewarm or spammy at best. Angel list on the other hand, works way better for me, so if a gun were put to my head to choose between either and drop the other, I'd drop linkedin.

Linkedin seems kind of useful as far as signalling who/what types of people you are connected to if you don't add everyone at a whim when they request (like sub 250 connections), but I don't really know what that's worth to me or to others, and I don't think this a gun to the head moment.

Same for me. Linkedin was only useful as a sort of social network to keep contacts with former colleagues. For the Swiss job market, jobup.ch is the way to go.

Exactly. LinkedIn is... IF that, only ONE of the 3 places the "Single People" of this context go. As a developer, people I want to work with are looking for me in many, many places. LinkedIn is definitely one of the "easy places" but that also means I get a lot of spam.

I'm going to look a lot more closely at my own website now. People who want to work with us, "search" for us, not "LinkedIn" for us - thankfully. This means local IRL networks, communities, a certain Q&A site, events and blogs if you were wondering.

This isn't my most coherent comment. I'm not happy with what has just happened at all.

This could be totally unrelated, but damn this is a pretty stupid bad signal.

LinkedIn's iOS Developer Community cancels WWDC watch party after Microsoft purchase: http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/06/13/linkedins-ios-deve...

I imagine it's to stop hoards of reporters from coming in and bugging them for as many details as possible.

I'm genuinely curious as to what makes LinkedIn worth that much. On the surface it just looks like Microsoft is trying to commit suicide.

As as aside, how many startups in Silicon Valley are rushing to up their spam game in the wake of this? :)

It'll be interesting to see how they integrate LinkedIn with Yammer (if they do at all). Particularly with the launch of Facebook at Work recently too.

just my own prediction.. msft will attempt to replatform the entire stack onto Azure, making heavy use of their Azure platform services as a way to show how scalable they are (sort of the same play they made with hotmail decades ago).

That's a very safe and sure bet. Why it would go any other way would be really puzzling.

Will they also rewrite it from Node to .NET core?

How does it work when a public company acquires another public company? If you have existing LinkedIn shares, do they get converted to Microsoft shares?... or do they just disappear one day, and a pile of cash takes its place?

That depends if the sale is for cash, stock, or a mix. Could be either or both of the alternatives you lay out.

This is an all cash acquisition.

In this case, the deal was structured as all cash. So the latter is exactly what happens. One day in your brokerage account you will see $X for every Y shares you had.

What about employee equity? Especially unvested options or stock units?

Can someone explain how Microsoft bought a publicly traded company? Shareholders own Linked in, so did they buy a controlling interest and or is there currently a tender offer circulating for all holders of the common stock?

Also curious that MS is valuing it Linked stock at $196 dollars a share when before the weekend it was trading at $133. Did they believe it was undervalued by almost 50% then? That seems dubious.

In the announcement Hoffman is described as the "controlling shareholder". Presumably this controlling interest [1] gives him the ability to agree to the sale without necessarily having the agreement of the other shareholders.

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/controllinginterest.asp

Ah, I missed that pertinent detail in the announcement, makes sense. Thanks. Facebook is similar in this respect - a controlling person and publicly traded entity.

To put things in perspective, WhatsApp was bought in October, 2014 for $22 billion.

I believe it will be great for whole industry, because microsoft money pushed Likedin to more user and developer friendly environment (Yes, I suppose they will open API again aka twitter). Better API will bring more business tools integration, so it increases role of Linkedin, as result it will push the whole social media market to a new level, instead current stagnation.

I think Salesforce is about to get much stronger competition from Microsoft's Dynamics CRM. If they connect Dynamics CRM with LinkedIn's massive database of orgs and professionals--a treasure trove for marketing and sales teams--and embargoes other CRM software from that data[0], I can see them taking market share from Salesforce.

[0] LinkedIn did exactly this when it acquired Rapportive—another popular sales tool. They let Rapportive continue accessing LinkedIn data but blocked competitors from doing so.

PS - They mention that, as a result of this acquisition, Office 365 users might be able to invite other professionals to collaborate on their documents or projects. It's interesting that they chose such a weak example, when it's clear there are much greater benefits they'll be able to offer. One I already mentioned, and many more are mentioned in this thread. Probably trying to keep competitors guessing?

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 oxymoron, but bear with me. It is social in the sense that users register and interact with each other just as on a regular social network, but ultimately the service is corporate focused. LinkedIn has created one of the biggest and best maintained databases of employment information (and of possible business contacts) in the world. As TheArcane said, LinkedIn is "Facebook + Monster on steroids".

If you don't believe me, try to speak to people you know, active professionals outside of the IT sector and see how many of them have LinkedIn profiles. Better yet, talk to people who are not in employer-dominated sectors (i.e. not like IT, where the demand for qualified workers greatly exceeds the supply).

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; I don't think Skype or Nokia paid off. And in general tech companies often buy other companies without much apparent success. Why is it so crazy to doubt their wisdom in any particular instance?)

> 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.

Wow.

In terms of data mining this is still a huge price-point, but obviously some team at MS projected the benefits vs expense.

Yeah, once integrated, I'd be worried if I was an MS employee using it to scout competitors and talk to recruiters.

This also gives MS some great data to possibly feed into the team that manages their investment portfolio. How valuable would it be to have a (admittedly not perfect) feed of employee growth/deflation for various companies? That would also provide a ton of leverage for future acquisitions, etc.

There's a LOT you can learn from LinkedIn data if you have access to the unfiltered data.

Exactly! And the gold weapon would be able to see all employees' corporate and private emails, along with their search queries. Uh oh.

Reminds me of the joke - MS Executive buys Skype for $8bn - didn't anyone tell him you can download it for free?

> What value is added by buying LinkedIn for $26G?

1. Integrate Skype into LinkedIn 2. Add a shared chat screen (video group chat)

This will allow many Human Resources to perform interviews more efficiently (in return to subscription). I can imagine many other new attractive features MS could easily add (e.g. syntax highlighting in group chat).

And can get rid of horrible Webex calls.

Webex at least works under linux (unfortunatelly only 32bit firefox).

I maintain a windows vm solely for running webex! I did not know this worked - thanks.

Jit.si

Works in browser, no account, encrypted by default.

New web based WebEx attendance is essentially in beta.

They haven't managed to integrate Skype into anything else, it's a complete shemozzle. Why would they suddenly manage to integrate it into LinkedIn?

Skype is offered in Office365 packages and appears to have replaced Lync

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.

MS bought skype just to stop google from buying they. Google made a big for skype and MS swooped in and outbid them. They never had any real plans for skype they just dont want to allow google to gain near monopoly in the consumer VOIP market. Which seems strange for MS to care about since they were not in this sector previously but Ballmer just held such a huge grudge with google and did it out of spite. Really shows what kind of CEO Ballmer was and why MS is so much better off without him

Skype for Business (and it's predecessor Lync) owns corporate voice and collaboration market

Unfortunately.

But it didn't back then, and it's only called Skype because MS acquired Skype, not the other way around. At the time of the acquisition, comparing Skype to Office Communicator (as it was called before Lync) was a stretch at best.

Cisco WebEx and Jabber own corporate voice communication (mostly because everyone uses Cisco VoIP phones). Skype is used mostly in the SMB market.

Skype for Business is just rebranded Lync. AFAIK there aren't any new features that were integrated across from Skype. Hell, it's still lync.exe.

We just 'upgraded' from Lync to Skype for Business and as far as I can tell it's exactly the same program with slightly different UI chrome.

They, erm, can't do that. Scraping LinkedIn would violate the terms of service.

It's actually a brilliant synergy. LinkedIn was limited to a revenue model around HR, recruiters, and individuals buying subscriptions to different views of their core service. They weren't in the business of building CRMs, enterprise email solutions, or operating systems. And yet those very systems are the ones where people most natively would want to ask "what is the context and history of the person I'm connecting to?"

Beyond the expansion in potential revenue models, it's rational for Microsoft to spend their cash on things that cement their dominance in the workplace, particularly as Apple and Google could always choose to make a hard push into that space. Assuming LinkedIn continues to dominate as a professional network, Windows 15 Powered By LinkedIn is a hell of a moat to cross.

>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.

Yeah, I'm sure they did the same with Yammer too.

LinkedIn is very big in enterprise sales, for example - gathering intel on the org.

> 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.

The same people who valued Nokia ($7.6 billion writedown) and aQuantive ($6 billion writedown)?

Different people. Both of those acquisitions were in the Ballmer era.

Don't Microsoft own a fund? Wouldn't they realistically send the same team to value Linkdin and Nokia?

Would you send the same people after the job they did last time?

This criticism is only valid if you can show that the due diligence team that worked Nokia also a) misreported the red flags / the enterprise value of the acquisition, and b) were responsible for mismanaging the post-merger integration.

A good deal of M&A goes ahead despite the warnings from the DD team. Sometimes it's a matter of CEO ego, sometimes a strategic long shot overruling the red flags.

It's easy (and fun!) to criticize in hindsight, but there was a strong strategic case to be made for the Nokia acquisition back then. Obviously it didn't work out, but given Microsoft's cash reserves at the time it wasn't even a particularly large gamble.

It's not "criticism in hindsight." It's simply acknowledging that those same "bright cookies" can make mistakes.

Fair enough. My point was that there's a difference between a valuation mistake and a calculated risk that doesn't work out - and it can be very difficult to tell which one's which, especially from the outside. Any acquisition can end up a failure because of integration issues, changing market conditions, failure to execute new products, etc. - it doesn't necessarily mean the original valuation was wrong.

Very good points. Thanks.

I really did not see many people making a case for Microsoft's Nokia acquisition (here and in the business press).

It seemed mostly negative.

Well, both HN and the business press are often negative - and on the surface Microsoft was buying a failing business, so it's a reasonable reaction.

A case in favor of the acquisition might go something like this:

1. Microsoft was far, far behind in mobile, with little hope to catch up through internal efforts alone. "Winning" mobile had the promise to unlock a lot of new revenue across Microsoft's other business units, "losing" mobile threatened to restrict Microsoft to the stagnating desktop market.

2. The industry was already consolidating (Google buying Motorola), there was a looming patent war, Nokia was sitting on a ton of patents, and was one of the few (if not the only) good target left for acquisition.

3. CEO of Nokia was ex-Microsoft, so Microsoft likely had a good idea what they were getting. (Conversely, this could mean Nokia CEO knew exactly how to apply lipstick to a pig to get it sold).

In short, limited time window to act, potential for dramatic growth for Microsoft if it works out, relatively small downside if it doesn't (IIRC the cost was something like 10% of Microsoft's cash reserves at the time). I'd take that bet to be honest.

All of this is speculation of course (I have no inside knowledge), and it was clearly not worth it in the end, but I can understand why a decision like this might have been made.

Nokia was a public company. Sure they paid a premium, but the valuation was defined by the share price.

The problem with Nokia was with the disaster of Microsoft's mobile strategy.

> it is a corporate social network

I'd go further and say it is a global corporate social network (unlike, say Yammer, which is a local corporate social network).

I agree that this is a fantastic play by MS. When I am researching both job candidates and employers, LinkedIn is one of the two resources I use (Google being the other).

"Corporate social network" is nowhere near an oxymoron. The value of strong and weak connections alike is critical to businesses and professionals.

does anyone actually interact on LinkedIn? I thought it was just a platform for recruitment spam

Recruitment spam or not it works and mediates a lot of jobs and connections. I don't think you should diminish LinkedIn's role on the job market.

And yes, a lot of my colleagues are very frequent users of LinkedIn for sharing and discussing business related stuff. With that said these tend to be non-techy people. Techy people tend to use sites like HN instead.

In my experience, there's plenty of sales people and middle managers posting stuff and commenting. Usually platitudes and mangled quotes from rich people, plus submissions of their company's marketing blogs.

Those things are just the neurotransmitters spewed by people who are becoming analogues to neurons. (Not aware of why they are filtering and passing on signals, but somehow performing some kind of decision making in aggregate.)

Absolutely. Various technical forums are active despite the horrible, horrible UX.

Couldn't have been said better - I mean, even a small, less than half-way competent team could easily build something providing a (much) better UX as compared to the LinkedIn forums.

I get most of my gigs through contacts on linked-in.

Yes, I got a guy in trouble for selling me a password-protected system board and not replying when I asked him whats going on (he took it from his boss' laptop, wrote it off as defective or something). Heh

Imagine this: A recruiter messages you and then follows up with a skype interview through LinkedIn.

So you can tell them in person that you don't live in the same country or work in even vaguely the same area rather than ignoring them as you do now?

As opposed to using the superior Hangouts product? That's gonna suck.

To make that happen they'll have to put up even more barriers to messaging people out-of-band. Much like Upwork/etc.

You can do this... today! Without spending $26bn.

If MS can disconnect LinkedIn from having to monetise its social graph directly, they might actually be able to turn it into something likeable.

As far as it is a "corporate social network" the interests of all LinkedIn users, both the good and the bad ones, do not benefit from forcing integration of Microsoft software, accounts, paid services etc. down their throat.

I am not sure what their goals are with this but they are definitely showing that they don't want to be in the technology business anymore.

Nnnnnnnnnn-maybe.

Seems more like a partial swing towards enterprise-emphasis.

Considering the Yammer failure, This purchase makes no sense whatsoever. Satya is flushing MS down the toilet.

Here is the main problem: Who likes LinkedIn?

Sure, we can debate its usefulness, how popular it is outside of IT, etc. But I think across the board, no one LIKES LinkedIn.

You dont need to be liked to be popular. How many people like facebook ?

Thats my point though. You dont have to be liked to be popular, but it becomes a lot easier for someone else to become popular if you are not liked.

And I do think the general sentiment towards Facebook is much more positive than LinkedIn.

Facebook is irritating and intrusive. LinkedIn is spam. It's garbage used because legacy and lack of alternative.

It seems like recruiters do.

Obviously most engineers don't.

i like it ok. it directly led to my current job, and couple other good offers. for $0 i can't complain.

Well said. There are lots of reasons for skilled software engineers to despise LinkedIn. They don't need its version of networking, and they find recruiters' endless serenades tiresome.

But in most other lines of work, the recruiters don't knock so often (or so cluelessly) ... and the access to other people's profiles actually is quite handy. Sales. Finance. Media. Education. Law. Non-profits. It's a long list.

It's anyone's guess whether Microsoft can execute the bulk of its strategic plan for LinkedIn. But the plan is not foolish.

> They don't need its version of networking

I don't really get this - it's weird to me that when I meet other developers at meetups or conferences or wherever, it doesn't seem "cool" to connect on LinkedIn, but nothing else fills that same role. I'm happy to trade GitHub profiles, but unless both of us do most of our interesting work in the open, which statistically we don't, then that's a much less informative profile.

> 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.

By that simplistic reasoning no big company would ever make a mistake.

Valuations are a funny thing. There's sooo much cash floating around in large companies coffers doing nothing (especially Microsoft's) that the numbers start meaning a whole lot of nothing after awhile.

> 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.

That kind of justification has almost always gone wrong.

Its a great acquisition. But is the price justified?

LNKD is extremely powerful when paired with CRM. To the point that MSFT might have seen this as a better choice than buying Salesforce, especially as their own in house CRM offering (Dynamics) is becoming very strong, and far more likeable for end users.

The biggest loser from this deal was Salesforce, they will be gutted.

This move took me completely by surprise, and I'm pretty impressed in Nadella for pulling it off. Although LNKD is a pretty ordinary proposition (financially - and what else really matters nowadays) by itself, 1 + 1 can equal 3 if it is linked tightly with Microsoft's productivity products such as Skype for Business, Outlook, CRM etc. And MSFT took advantage of LNKDs poor recent performance to buy them "cheap" while making their management look like hero's when the market was beginning to think they were anything but.

you work at hubspot with that ridiculous terminology? 1 + 1 = 2 period.

I'm not sure what you mean? No I don't have anything to do with hubspot...

Wonder how many people will use this as an opportunity to either create a linkedin profile or to delete the one they already have. Change-of-control risks on a deal like this are substantial.

This is also an excellent reminder that you never know where the profiles you create will end up.

Yeah, I am debating closing mine today.

You better hurry before Microsoft removes that "feature".

LOL, sounds like it won't be until the end of the year for the deal to have a chance to succeed, and only then will Microsoft get the LinkedIn keys. So I think I will wait until the deal has a better chance of closing.

I deleted mine two years back but am trying to get a job at MSFT around august, so I suppose I should now make one, huh?

Genuine question... what do MS stand to gain from this?

One can only assume that they want to dig their heels into entreprise. LinkedIn is massive when it comes to professional connections & Hiring, even company PR. LinkedIn has a bunch of products that can connect well into MS’s ecosystems and add value there.

They probably got Slideshare (meh) and Lynda (very good) in the package.

Disclaimer: I work at one of Lynda's competitors.

Seems grossly over priced on a per active user basis: ________

26.2 billion / (425 million*25% active) =

$247 per active user

Is that 25% active an estimate or a reported number?

The source for the 25% of users being active in a month was from the 3rd quarter earnings report for 2015.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/29/linkedin-now-has-400m-user...

Somewhat more info in the press release:

http://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-li...

That makes $60.5 per user. Compared to other social networks this seems to be within a reasonable range.

Perhaps LinkedIn will use fewer evil antipatterns now that its ownership has something resembling a reputation to uphold.

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

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

No, I'm saying that a group of individuals in the company made the decision, including managers and perhaps senior execs. It was not a board level decision, at least imo.

> A group of them fucked up with that Windows 10 debacle

I don't think that the auto-update feature was introduced by a "group of developers". This was purely board of directors driven.

You've made this comment more than once on this thread. Microsoft employs many people, but it is hierarchily managed.

Things like the Windows 10 dark patterns might happen, but once the users complain (and users have been complaining since the day win 10 was out, when the patterns weren't nearly as dark), someone with veto power gets involved.

This was definitely done with the approval - and I guess blessing and even direction of nadella himself.

I didn't buy the "new Microsoft" for a second.

I just don't see it. I don't see something this low level spun up to board level.

I'm also not sure what "new Microsoft" you're referring to. Their attitude is much much better under Satya; they're not perfect but they're moving in the right direction.

The board level may very well have set down a strategy which was "Hey, computers that are running old versions of our OS are a real pain. Let's tell our OS team that we need them to get customers to upgrade. Hell, we've looked at the figures and it's actually cheaper for us to GIVE Windows 10 away - so keep that in mind technical peeps".

The technical peeps come to look at it and decide on this stupid idea. Interestingly, Microsoft applied a half assed fix to the problem:

"Based on customer feedback, in the most recent version of the Get Windows 10 (GWX) app, we confirm the time of your scheduled upgrade and provide you an additional opportunity for cancelling or rescheduling the upgrade. The screen you see may change slightly based on new feedback."

From: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3095675

So you see, they did address the problem.

It's really not some evil plan to screw over their users. It was a dumb mistake, made by a handful of people who then half-assedly corrected it.

As a tech community we're fixated on this shit but in the real world it really doesn't reflect all of Microsoft.

We're not talking about the "upgrade to Windows 10 update", but about the routine updates that are pushed to your Windows 10 system at random times without your consent.

You also overlook that very often, once these updates are applied you can notice that new applications as essential as "Candy Crush Saga" have been installed on your system. I guess the "technical peeps" you mention thought users would enjoy the game and just pushed it to the release binary.

Irony aside, why do you persist to try to defend what is indefensible ? I am a .NET developer and the first to acknowledge and evangelize the existence of a new Microsoft. But the way they have turned Windows 10 into a malware is unacceptable.

Personally I have made my mind that as soon as .NET Core is mature I am switching to Linux. As much as I like Microsoft I can't accept to run this kind of system, they have crossed a line here.

We can happily agree to disagree - I think that on the whole Microsoft are a good company, they do good things, and I see no reason to beat them up for what I believe are minor mistakes in the grand scheme of things.

> I just don't see it. I don't see something this low level spun up to board level.

No one is talking about board level. board meets once a month or two, unless there's a very good reason. I was talking about CEO (whose position on the board is not relevant to this discussion).

It's in every possible computer publication, with discussion of legal class action (and at least one already submitted). If this doesn't get to CEO level, Microsoft is improperly managed. If I had a way to verify, I would bet some money that indeed Nadella is aware, and has authorized or even blessed this course of action.

> So you see, they did address the problem.

People were complaining that they can't make GWX go away; so microsoft made it recommended instead of optional, and an 'x' makes it install. Then they roll back. This is known as the "Squash and a Squeeze"[0] or the "Get rid of the goat"[1] technique to make things seem acceptable. In politics, it is known as the Overton window[2]. I dare say this was a calculated gambit, and I do consider this a dark pattern.

> It was a dumb mistake, made by a handful of people who then half-assedly corrected it.

That is a very charitable explanation, which I do not accept.

> I'm also not sure what "new Microsoft" you're referring to.

I'm referring to the "open source loving, friendly, nice guy" Microsoft is considered by some people lately, as opposed to the convicted monopolist, horrible, only-behave-when-they've-been-beaten-to-submission, android-and-exchange-patent-extorting Microsoft. I don't think a lot has changed - and I think Win10 is a good example for how little has really changed.

I expect you disagree, and that's fine. You keep using Microsoft, and I'll keep avoiding them as I have done for the past 12 years or so.

[0] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1059041.A_Squash_and_a_Sq... [1] http://www.beliefnet.com/love-family/parenting/2000/10/teach... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

I bought linkedin a couple of months ago at like 108 or so... I'm debating whether or not to sell half or all my stock... needless to say the wife is thrilled that I finally did some investing right :)

I was wondering this too, but I think half the reason the stock jumped up to ~192 is due to the sentiment of this acquisition being approved by the FTC.

Since it's a cash deal, you'll miss out on ~$4 share, and since you bought in Feb/March, you'll end up paying your normal tax rate in capital gains. My guess is they approve this deal before Feb/March so no clear advantage holding for that reason.

Perhaps someone else could chime in as well?

Most Important Question : Do LinkedIn employees stop getting free food or Microsoft employees get free food now?

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.

They still could. They do have a bit of cash.

They're already doing the Ubuntu on Windows thing with Canonical, no need to buy them yet. Wait at least for the Extend phase.

Buying Canonical would be very unwise. I'm pretty sure user rates would drop like hell on the day of the announcement. I know I would change my distro.

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.

Red Hat pulled back how?

As for buttering any Linux distribution, I think Microsoft has focused traditionally on SUSE (even announced an "alliance" back in '11).

> Red Hat pulled back how?

By focusing on the enterprise, they became much less visible for individual Linux users. Even though Fedora is still there, it was a huge shift in how engaged Redhat apppeared to those not directly involved with projects that Redhat are involved in.

They still contribute massively, but they are much less visible outside of enterprise users than they used to be.

Of course this is not all their doing - the rise of Ubuntu also contributed, but arguable Ubuntu would have had a much harder time if it wasn't for the Redhat shift.

So, just a typical day for Microsoft for the past ~20 years?

I think, they just haven't bought those yet, because they could get a monopolization lawsuit for that. Red Hat and Canonical are among their biggest competitors in the OS market, as small as they are.

That's quite the pay day for Reid Hoffman. 14.5m shares at $196 = $2.8bn. All cash deal. Ching ching!!

Two shitty companies merge. I can only imagine what Microsoft has planned for LinkedIn. Hopefully this is one of those acquisitions where they purchase it and shut it down months later.

Are the guys in the picture at the top photoshopped on another pic?

Doesn't it look like it? The light is really wonky; either photoshop or an HDR photo (which would be a really weird choice here).

and the composition is just bizarre.

so strange to see for a multibillion dollar company acquiring another one.

Regarding the picture at the top of the article, it looks like it's been photoshopped.

The lighting is inconsistent with the background. I think the tree on the left has been added with the same lighting to try make the lighting of Satya and the two others unnoticed.

Without the tree, this picture would be blatantly laughable. At the same level as http://goo.gl/S6y3Qx

The internet is becomming more and more like real world businesses.

We're going to be left with four or so big companies. Facebook, Google, Microsoft.

Yahoo Twitter e.t.c will be swallowed up next.

Don't forget Amazon

will not be swallowed

Here's hoping Microsoft keeps up it's recent good guy persona, and starts actively identifying and removing dark patterns from LinkedIn.

/sarcasm?

No, I'm serious. I'm not a big MS fan, but they've been doing some good things lately. Hopefully they can make LinkedIn feel less scummy.

Prior to forcing people's computers to move to Win 10 and using scummy badware tactics (close the dialog to install, no "do not install" option) I'd have agreed; MS looked like they were reforming.

The only explanation I can come up with is an aquihire of dark ui-pattern experts from LinkdIn to better trick users into installing Windows 10.

An angle I haven't seen anyone mention:

They now own Lynda.com, one of the strongest software and general education entities out there. This gives them not only a channel for promoting their own software (or providing some really comprehensive integrated help/training), but an insight into what kinds of software and other training people are putting time into.

We updated the link from http://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-..., which points to this.

IMO, Microsoft has the means and resources to sift thru linkedIn metadata to gain an hiring advantage over their competitors. In addition they could probably infer what other companies are doing thru their hiring and searches. There is no other platform like this with this scale another monopoly; human resources.

Interesting to see the obvious pro-microsoft bias in comments here. I can only imagine the worst from microsoft and their user-hostile behaviour.

* trojan-like telemetry impossible to control or block

* malware-like behaviour through "legitimate" software update channels, force-feeding windows 10 on unwilling customers

* embrace-extend-extinguish, mission accomplished by destroying Nokia's smart phone business

* their recent shenanigans with skype, and how they killed Linux support

* their abysmal, hard-to-use new directions in UI design (flat, 2D, no contrast, paper-like, or even metro for that matter)

I can already think of three to four nasty ways they can leverage (abuse) all the LinkedIn user information, work history, contacts, and networks, and I'm sure they will do it based on their recent user-antagonistic behaviour.

Oh, but they've nicely polished up their PR machinery so everything's cool now.

I totally agree that Hacker News is becoming quite bias ... This in itself should be raise with the ycombinator itself, the bias is what pushed Slashdot down

dang (mod) addressed this misplaced belief that there's MS bias a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253

At least in the discussions area, there is a distinct lack of "hacker culture" opinion expressed on any topic, given the name of the forum. At least from where I am standing, this reflects very poorly on ycombinator, and the "Tech Culture" that they are putting investors in touch with.

Trigger Warning - Doubleplus Ungood Thoughtcrime ahead

For a certain portion of the readership, Microsoft can do no wrong ... and when they do wrong, it's never their fault.

Perhaps the site should be renamed to "Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals with Rose Coloured Glasses and No Clue, Living in an Artificially Inflated 1st World Bubble News" would be a more accurate title.

This acquisition makes perfect sense for anyone who thinks that "the real economy" is in great shape, and middle management jobs are likely to experience unheard of growth over the next few years. Layoff numbers are just made up propaganda, and everyone around the world loves the US Dollar.

When this level of backslapping groupthink starts to predominate, its a pretty sure sign that things are rotten in Denmark, and should be a clear warning sign for smart investors in this market. But .... each to their own, its their money they are gambling with I suppose. (or conversely, other people's retirement hopes that they are gambling with)

Anyway, I find it interesting that Linkedin's infrastructure is written in a mashup of Java, Scala, Ruby, and God knows what else.

You can almost guarantee that somewhere in the corridors of power, some pointy haired boss types are putting together a PowerPoint® presentation on how they are going to port all of Linkedin's codebase to .NET in 3 easy steps, for great profit. What could possibly go wrong ?

Big congrats to anyone that manages to cash in their Linkedin stock in the near future. If so, you have just managed to sell premium seats on the deck of the Titanic for top dollar !!

The people here are upvoting the celebration and downvoting the criticism for obvious reasons. They see themselves as the next $26B acquisition.

It's something akin to that quote:

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

I'd replace that with:

"Morality never took root in the people of the world because humans see themselves not as individuals of exploited mass but as temporarily embarrassed Overlords."

At least Microsoft will be able to tout the inability to delete a LinkedIn profile as a feature and not a bug.

I've read many complaints about how linkedin is a tool that has so much potential if it was just done right... and no one here is entertaining the possibility that MS is thinking the same way? I know MS has a bad track record for acquisitions but I think this one has a lot of potential.

"Think: everyone who graduates from college and looks for a job will now have a Microsoft account."

https://twitter.com/saschasegan/status/742342770891862016

Am I the only one who has applied and gotten jobs without ever creating a LinkedIn account?

After hearing all the horror stories about their email spam (and how they spam all your contacts) and how random recruiters contact you with irrelevant offers, I have (so far) managed to stay completely off LinkedIn and hope to never have to sign up.

You probably have an account: LinkedIn has many ghost accounts auto-generated based on findings from trawling users' address books/contact lists.

I know bandwidth is cheap these days but including a 14.9mb cover image on such a major story....?

I for one welcome our new Windows overlords!

Let's hope they pull another Nokia with this, er, beloved company.

If I use Skype acquisition as a guide we can expect advertisements all over the site very soon.

LinkedIn closed public trading on Friday at ~131 per share. This deal represents a $196 per share price - so anyone that purchased on Friday is looking at ~50% ROI.

Is this the best non-Facebook ROI for a social network that's been available to the public markets?

Headline should have been "Microsoft adds LinkedIn to their professional network"

Underrated post.

I am currently a grad student at a top5 university in US and been at a top5 in India. I can say from experience that LinkedIn is dying and no longer valued as professional profile. LinkedIn had a nice concept of connection, however after a few accept alls I have 500+ connections with a similar amount pending. The messages I receive are garbage, the feed is stale. There is no incentive to open the website and I have unsubscribed from all their marketing email as they are ~ spam. Maybe this is just me but I feel WhatsApp is way more popular /useful/growing and Microsoft paid more than that for a dying network.

True, Linkedin is spam and their apps/feed are copycats of FB. But, they have a monopoly over professional networking and so recruiting. The data is the gold mine, there's no way any new company would be able to convince 440 million people to create profile with all the information. So all MSFT wants to is to probably improve their product line, cross sell Office/Dynamics to Linkedin's customers and may be buy some HR/payroll to create a complete suite(Recruting+ HR + Communication + Enterprise tools).

On their press release[1] presentation[2] they have shown this as Microsoft's Graph - http://imgur.com/elacuzH. How and Why is the question.

[1]-https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor [2]-https://c.s-microsoft.com/en-us/CMSFiles/InvestorPresentatio...

Do many people use Yammer? The company that I'm with tried it a few years back and it just wasn't useful for us. I wonder if they will end up merging Yammer, or at least some Yammer features, into LinkedIn at some point.

Coming from a company that uses Yammer if it does get Yammer I am totally out and I mean it this time linkedin!

It's essentially unchanged since they bought it. I think all they really did was put Yammer notifications in Outlook. I wouldn't be surprised if LinkedIn turns out the same way.

They had to write off the Nokia deal (over 7 billion I believe), this might be the next one of those.

I think their ability to write-off most of the $26b in a couple years must be a defining feature of the whole transaction. I.e. "Oh well, at least the Fed is paying for half of it!"

They also updated Sharepoint to support Yammer integration and made it part of the default Office365 offering.

Stock price movements after one day: MSFT down ~ $12bn, LNKD up ~ $9bn.

Looks like they overpaid a bit.

I wonder what the future holds for Lynda.com which was just recently purchased by LinkedIn. I've been a member for years and was already concerned over the LI acquisition. Hopefully, they are not lost in the shuffle.

Oh wow. This purchase does not make any sense. What benefit does LinkedIn bring to Microsoft?

Wouldn't surprise me another competitor will emerge and replace LinkedIn. It's time anyway with their annoying spamming of late.

Imagine you're one of the biggest companies in the world.

On from that imagine you could afford to buy one of the most comprehensive CRMs in the world and all the lovely data it holds. In addition to the fringe benefits, if Microsoft use this purchase intelligently they'll reap serious rewards from it.

(I fucking hate Linked In, but I think it's a legit purchase for Microsoft)

True - I can see them using this purchase to sell more cloud services by mining the data for connections.

https://twitter.com/ThePracticalDev/status/74234336148344832...

I was already very upset with the direction Windows 10 was taking in term of privacy. Now Microsoft wants to be big in social network. I hate to say that but it is really time to ditch Windows.

Plusses: LinkedIn is distinctive among social networks. That's one reason Facebook hasn't killed LinkedIn, yet. Though I increasingly find my business contacts interact with me on Facebook rather than LinkedIn. A bigger plus may be that a business-oriented social network is strategically coherent for Microsoft.

Minuses: LinkedIn is relatively small. It's not that well-implemented. It has an oddball business model. It has no messaging component, and that's where social networking is going.

I think it's telling of the times, my increased opinion of Microsoft, and my horrible impression of LinkedIn, that I expect this to result in better LinkedIn behavior than previously. Microsoft still has its own problems, but in my opinion they are far better than the skeezy feeling I get from LinkedIn's marketing and promotion to "linked" email accounts (that is, addresses they've associated to you and send notices that people are trying to contact you on).

Facebook does something similarly sleazy. I have multiple email accounts. Facebook hasn't made the connection that I'm the same person. On each email account I regularly get emails saying that my profile has already been set-up and all I have to do is log-in for the first time by clicking on this link (and yes, I have a Facebook account linked to a different email address).

I'm not sure how this isn't considered spam. Unless you've expressly told them that the other account is yours, there's no way to ensure they aren't sending unsolicited email,as "we thought they would want to know" is not a valid defense against the laws that exist.

This kinda makes sense from an enterprise social network perspective. This could tie really well and augment their messaging products (Skype for Business (was Lync)). Most professionals may not have Skype or may not wish to expose their Skype ids but maybe ok with LinkedIn as that has always been their professional front. So basically every LinkedIn account has Skype integration. I can see the marketing angle from a group meeting, and eventually collaboration perspective.

Another account which will be forcibly connected with ms credentials. Opportunity to collect another sensitive information in an effort to create "better UX".

Worked well for Google +...

I hope this does not end up being a Yammer 2.0.

I also don't see other companies advertising jobs on the platform owned my a big tech giant whose sole purpose isn't that. I don't think they will make more money in the "recruiting" side.

This deal sounds like a 50% premium but that just brings it back to what it was 6 months ago, lesser than the peak price. Sounds more like LinkedIn just gave up.

Only positive thing I see is, that MS can bundle HR software with Office 365.

LinkedIn is becoming this internet monster.

Where is the ethic alternative that is for everybody? (e.g.: AngelList is only for tech startups stuff and not for waiter kind of stuff).

I hope LinkedIn is shut now forever now, with all the spam.

In addition to what others have said (what does it get Microsoft, etc.), how would this even be allowed? It would mean most recruiters going through Microsoft to get to candidates. I can just imagine how well that would go over at other tech companies: how can they be sure Microsoft isn’t getting “first crack” at people, etc. and does Microsoft then know which companies are about to lose employees?

Most recruiters going through Linked Inc. is any different?

What would qualify a company to run an job board?

For one thing, the scale is very different: Microsoft is into almost everything, whereas LinkedIn as a company was relatively focused. The number of competing companies that cared about LinkedIn seeing information is far smaller than the number of companies that compete with Microsoft in some way. Never mind the fact that Microsoft owns a platform used by the vast majority of devices.

Sounds like an awful lot of money. Must be cheaper ways to make the money LinkedIn is supposed to make them.

And MS has a pretty bad history with these big acquisitions. MS Kin failed. Skype is not what it used to be. People seemed to start leaving it after MS bought it and made it worse. Nokia was a big disaster.

Shouldn't they have learned by now? I pretty sure MS is not going to make back the money spent on LinkedIn.

Prediction: LinkedIn will integrate with office 365, and you will be forced into a LinkedIn for Business account when you use Office 365. You can choose to make your information public, private or a combination of both (hopefully).

This will be marketed as a single place to keep up-to-date resumes, towards both job seekers and corporate HR people who want better insight into their own workforce.

Why would Microsoft release a major M&A announcement at 8:35 AM EST / 5:35 AM PST? It's not even the professional workday yet!

The market opens at 9 and traders are usually up earlier to get ready for the high opening volume..

Because trading opens at 9:30.

They probably finished the deal over the weekend.

E: And it could well be the case that they had planned to announce it yesterday but chose not to because of the Orlando shootings.

As others have stated, this is about prepping the debt markets. They have to sell the deal to potential bond investors.

To get the news out without disrupting the markets - it's fairer to allow people to see news like this while the instrument is not trading.

As a prior equities trader, these were our year-makers if it happened during trading hours.

Can you elaborate on this for a non-trader?

LNKD closed at $131 per share on Friday and opened at $191 on Monday. That's a $60 move. The news happening outside of trading hours means that all the bid/offers didn't get executed, just that the valuation changed of currently held stock. If it happened during market hours, that move would 1) be more exaggerated due to human psychology, and 2) you'd actually be able to trade the news. If you managed to catch 1,000 shares at 131 before it jumped, you'd be making $60k on an investment of $131k. If you managed to catch only half of the move on 10,000 shares, that's $300k in profit on a $1.3m investment. To put it in perspective, day 1 on my job I was given $1m to "play with and get to know my keyboard shortcuts".

http://f.ptcdn.info/713/028/000/1424666722-5-o.png

In the image above, the stock price is 3.85. The green columns are bid/ask. It shows that there are 40,000 shares people are trying to buy at 3.84, 33,100 shares to buy at 3.82, etc. On the other side, there are 5 million shares someone is trying to sell at 3.86. If this imaginary stock suddenly was bought for $5.00 per share, You'd be able to buy 5 million shares at 3.86, (for about a $20m investment) and sell all of that for $5, for a profit of $5.7m (this is obviously the ideal case. More likely, those people selling at 3.86 would try to pull their offers before people could buy it, and other people would be trying to buy those 5m shares as well).

In that context and in regards to LNKD, it didn't really trade all that much volume prior to this, so you wouldn't be able to buy all that much stock. But a $60 change is pretty massive. Even catching a fraction of the move is pretty much "free money" just for having your hands on the keyboard.

It seems that there were unusually large amounts traded on Friday.

For reference, IPO in May 2011 was for $45/share, and they closed at $94.25 on the first day for a total market cap of $9bn, according to this [1] source.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/19/technology/linkedin_IPO/

If you bought into the IPO in May, you'd have realised a 33% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

[1] (196 / 45) ^ (1 / numberOfYearsSinceMay2011==5.118) - 1

The share price hasn't exactly been rosy recently, so at least the shareholders have something to look forward to.

http://markets.ft.com/research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=...

http://www.reuters.com/article/linkedin-results-research-idU...

Add that one to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

Looking trough the list this is probably the biggest acquisition for Microsoft (in monetary value). All-cash transaction nonetheless.

It's the 196th purchase that they bought at $196 / share. Somebody was having a laugh in the Finance department.

so in the end, a recruiting problem is solved bya software company, now could be named as the big L. wondering what happened to all those people who studied Human Resource as a management branch and what are they doing now when whole recruiting thing is being run by bunch of sw engineers sitting in silicon valley and crunching big data.

You still need human beings at companies who do HR, at least at decent sized companies. Someone needs to set up the interviews, walk people around, be the recipient of questions about payroll, PTO etc., and that is work nobody else wants to do.

I predict the next version of AD/Outlook will allow for direct integration between a company's workforce information and said workforce's public profile. Why bother with scraping your user's contact list when you can feed directly from the source system that already includes their name, email address, and job title.

Was this Microsoft's elaborate $26bn marketing plan to get the media to look away from Apple's WWDC announcements?

My thoughts exactly! Not that that's the main idea, but it is an odd coincidence that the announcement was today.

This is huge.

As an ex-Microsoft, I really don't understand that move. It doesn't make any sense. If the goal is to compete with the like of Facebook, I don't think it'll work as Linkedin is a business network. It makes me want to sell my stocks (-3.63% pre-market).

If I were MS I would have bought slack to replace both Sharepoint and Yammer.

Why is having a social network always just about competing with Facebook? Microsoft is very much in the business space, this is a business focused social network. Not a bad place to work on your business brand.

The word is they almost bought Slack, but decided to heavily invest into Lync instead, turning it into Skype for Business and such.

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)

From MSFT perspective -- good move. From LinkedIn perspective, good move as well -- they have great backing and got a great deal ($). As a user, I'm sad to see this -- the end of LinkedIn as we know it. I've no interest in MSFT holding my personal info online CV presence. Perhaps time to move to someplace else.

I mostly avoid LinkedIn, then they acquired Lynda.com and began integrating into (and basically degrading the experience of) a platform I had enjoyed for many years.

My only concern is what this means for Lynda.com, it would be great if it could return to its pre-LinkedIn state, but I have a feeling it will somehow only get worse.

Too much money. Wayyyy too much.

And if this goes the way of most other very large MS acquisitions, it'll be utterly wasted.

I personally don't like LinkedIn itself but I recognise that it fills an huge market need. Probably that's why LinkedIn survived to so many bad decisions and was able to retain users.

Once Microsoft is walking the enterprise path, the acquisition looks like a logical investment. (logical != profitable)

196/share is roughly what LNKD was trading at before their very bad earnings report in February. FWIW.

Microsoft just spent 5% of their market cap buying Linkedin.

Does anybody think linkedin is worth one twentieth of Microsoft?

I don't.

I do, it's literally the most valuable network in the world. Facebook is a friends connection, but LinkedIn is a professional network. Add to that it also has some amazing insight into the macroeconomy, it's also a great tool for prediction.

LinkedIn knows the job report before the jobs report is released. Do you know how much money changes hands after that report is released?

I foresee a synergistic relationship between the companies. Microsoft is reorganizing to focus on business cloud solutions, built upon a subscription-based model. The online Office365 suite is the future. Acquiring LinkedIn will allow for targeting IT professionals.

That said, I hate LinkedIn.

ALL CASH. Holy fuck.

I bet the wire transfer gets held up for being potentially fraudulent because it's so big. I'd love to be the call centre worker who picks up that call.

I just can't imagine 26 billion dollars. That's beyond any human's comprehension.

You do it through comparisons.

A typical SF Bay Area core house is running close to $1 million these days.

A thousand such homes would be a billion. That's a small town, or a particular (upscale) San Francisco neighborhood, say, PacHeights or Cole Valley. Home to about 3,000 - 4,000 people.

Twenty six neighborhoods would be the full LinkedIn value. Call it 26,000 homes in the San Francisco or Peninsula area. Most of Palo Alto, and a neighboring town, say, Menlo Park, or Redwood City. About 75,000 - 100,000 people. One eighth of San Francisco.

The typical new car is, roughly, $26,000. A thousand of them them is $26 million. A typical freeway lane can see 2,000 cars an hour per lane, or, say for a large 10-lane freeway, 20,000 cars per hour. If you filled that highway to capacity for just over 2 days, you'd see $26 billion worth of (new) cars flowing past.

A 150,000 square foot school at $300/sqft construction costs (via random DDGing) runs about $45 million. You could build about 570 such schools.

Annual operating expenses of a large high school might run about $30 million. You could fund ~870 such schools for a year (or one school for 870 years).

Annual petroleum consumption in the US is about 19.6 million barrels per day. The LinkedIn purchase prices would cover 26 days of $50/bbl oil for the US.

Link to the press release: http://news.microsoft.com/2016/06/13/microsoft-to-acquire-li...

A social network is only as good as the recency of its data. They could integrate with Bing to show "people you know", and with other tools, it if people stop updating their profiles, it would be an expensive building acquisition.

Congratulations to AngelList!

What does this mean for the startup/VC market in the shirt term?

Confidence trending upwards again?

Smart for Microsoft and LinkedIn. Yet also means I expect LinkedIn to become even more distasteful to me, increasing the chance I abandon it. I also see no paradox with these two opposing observations. :-)

Regardless of how you feel, I think it's pretty amazing that even Microsoft with its vast resources doesn't feel they could compete with LinkedIn if they invested that same 26B in themselves.

Money is only one of the many resources you need to compete effectively. Another one is culture-integrated staff.

Users, how are u going to gain those many users.

You could spend 1B on the product and still have 25B for user acquisition. Microsoft already has an email list larger than LinkedIn.

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.

LinkedIn content is basically the same as Forwards from Grandma with the odd job announcement interspersed

The last gasp. Just like Yahoo with tumblr. When a corporate behemoth has a dream of transformation, they rather just buy that dream than to actually undergo transformation themselves.

Yahoo were borderline negligent with that purchase. I suspect the shareholders and board at Microsoft have a much better idea of what they're planning to do to monetise Linked In.

> Yahoo were borderline negligent with that purchase

That's not what most HNers were saying at that time, they were praising Mayer and her "awesome strategy" of shopping her way into success. Of course it didn't make sense at all, like that deal makes very little sense at all too.

Wow - I decided to look up the thread from when the acquisition was announced and I'm shocked at how positive the news was taken by the HN crowd:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737185

Looks like we've got an army of Captain Hindsight's here now given I never hear anybody defend the purchase on HN now it clearly is a flop.

Furthermore Forbes wrote an article on why the acquisition was a bad idea, and HNers beat it up!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737400

LinkedIn + Skype + Yammer gives MS the best inter-business or B2B directory/identity/contact-ibility.

Extremely valuable for a company competing for inter-business collaboration.

Depending how used, of course.

I wonder what they do with the online training provider lynda which is owned by linkedin? They could use that to push free training for Azure to increase the reach of its services??

I don't think anybody's going to like this but Microsoft.

It seems like a good fit. I getting these .NET developer recruiters with their "perfect match messages" even though I don't have .NET in my skillset...

Time to delete my LinkedIn account, or otherwise corrupt its contents before MS swallows it all. Microsoft doesn't have the right to my intellectual property.

Microsoft exec #1: "It seems that people are hating us less and less these days. Somehow, the quality of our products and services is perceived as higher and less hostile to users. That's a problem!"

Microsoft exec #2: "How about we acquire one of the most hated brands out there? One that makes tech people grind their teeth when it's even mentioned. How about LinkedIn? That should tarnish our image up till it's right back where it used to be."

Microsoft exec #1: "There could be a vice-presidency in it for me if I can make that work! Great idea!"

Dilbert material.

Mark my words...

Microsoft should have bought Wordpress. Much cheaper and could replace Sharepoint which is the most terrible invention on earth.

Why diversify your confusing offerings even further from relevance? LinkedIN? Come on.

Somehow feel that MS - Slack acquisition is coming soon

I hope they do a rewrite/redesign of the frontend.

From Scala to .Net?

No I'm talking about the user interface and user experience.

Jokes aside, I would really like a UI/UX inspired by outlook.com and the other MS web apps.

"Loading... The website doesn't respond. Do you want to restart?"

Yeah, if they roll out the Azure theme I would be incredibly happy!

Not that LinkedIn was stellar in any regard around user privacy, but is the situation expected to materially degrade under Microsoft?

Another nokia.....

> To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product.

What is the value of those users? I'd argue they're basically worthless, and that this is a disastrously bad acquisition.

Let me propose some concrete measures: How often is the service's single sign-on login button used in your app? What is the value of the users in your app sourced from this service? I'd argue this is a great comparison, because if you can't monetize LinkedIn's users by sourcing them from LinkedIn traditionally (via ads, clever sourcing hacks, sign in buttons, etc.), you're certainly not going to monetize them effectively by owning the whole platform.

Where it is available, Facebook can be something like 10% of a free-to-play mobile game's logins. Facebook ads may be the source for as many as 20% of your users. Facebook login and Facebook sourced users often have long term value twice as high as everyone else.

Facebook is very valuable, and it's what made Zynga, Supercell, IAC (Tinder, Match.com) rich. Spotify might see something as high as 20% logins, and the diminished amount of account sharing alone must make them a few million dollars extra. Theoretically, if Facebook had not censored game post spam on its network, Zynga would still be a huge, rich company. If only Zynga could have bought Facebook instead of all those little gaming companies...

By comparison, LinkedIn retired their single sign in button. When it was available, it may have represented less than 1% of logins on a business service website and app. LinkedIn-sourced users had no different LTV, and represented less than 2% of all users.

LinkedIn was probably overvalued before Microsoft bought it, radically so. LinkedIn had no way of legitimately realizing the 20% fees recruiters enjoy—and even if they did, those fees exist exclusively in the tech world, exclusively for a narrow part of the workforce, with no credible path to introducing those fees to the rest of employment recruiting. Considering LinkedIn's poor track record overall of the value of those users, what is Microsoft going to do with them instead?

A bunch of companies try this path and fail. For example, GoDaddy is trying the same thing: Buy companies (you've never heard of) to try to cross-sell between GoDaddy users and company users. They make acquisitions based on incorrectly extrapolated LTVs for like 100 accounts they intensively hand cross-sold pre-acquisition. Then GoDaddy discovers two things a year later: the actual LTV of their test cohort, which is wildly below their estimate, and the actual value of the remaining 99,900 of their acquired users, which is nothing. Even if you bought a zero-revenue startup for $100,000 and your cost per acquired user (CPA) is $1.00, your LTV is still near $0, so what did you earn?

I suspect this purchase isn't about users. I suspect major LinkedIn investors shopped around the company and financial-engineered a sophisticated kickback for the decision makers on the acquirer's end. Much like when Google purchased the Google Ventures-backed Nest and enriched a huge number of insiders at great shareholder expense, the acquisition team at Microsoft was probably duped into enriching a great deal of insiders too.

Considering that MS also owns Skype, could we see them combining those two technologies into some kind of interview platform?

Last time I was so perplexed with a valuation was back in 2007/2008 when BlackBerry was trading at over $100 per share.

I think the important question is why did linkedIn want to sell itself .. they were not in as much trouble as Twitter.

$26.2bn for a list of recruitment agencies. They could have bought the same data on the dark web for much cheaper...

What 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.

When they write off the 26 billion in a few years the tax payer will be paying 40% of the purchase price.

top bracket of corp tax rate is 35%. And taking less money from a corp one year is not 'tay payer paying for it'. The federal government will take less money from msft, that is not the tax payer paying for 35% of the purchase price.

Ouch. Reid Hoffman's 11 percent stake in LinkedIn is going to result in a $1 billion tax bill.

Problems I would love to have.

Something tells me he'll get over it by sleeping on a bed of $100 bills from the net proceeds.

What a surprise this is to hear! I didn't know LinkedIn was in the market to be acquired.

Does anyone know why they are paying a 50% premium to closing price? That seems massive.

Current market share price is of 132$ then why did Microsoft pay 90$ high? Any reason?

probably there are some information hidden behind scene.

If Microsoft buys LinkedIn, I wonder if Facebook will now try to enter that territory.

Facebook IS trying to enter that territory. Look up Facebook At Work. This should help to stifle that.

Linkedin is a great buy for Microsoft! Congratulations to my Linkedin friends. :)

From now, when you logout of LinkedIn, you will be redirected to msn.com :P

I'd like to see this valuation - this transaction looks shaky at best.

Something something private information changing hands in buyouts...

A leas they will fix the LinkedIN UI, that thing was psiing me off!!

Found the best summary of today's events so far... [0]

"SEATTLE — In a last-ditch attempt to connect with consumers, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced on Monday that he had purchased LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in an all-cash deal. Founded in 2003, the social networking giant — which boasts more than 443 million professionals — makes it possible for users to “connect” with people they don’t like enough to add on Facebook. 443 million of those “connections” were made early Monday morning, as Microsoft’s Nadella attempted to fulfill a lifelong dream of having more internet friends than MySpace Tom. The deal, which had been in the works for months, came together only days after Microsoft placed a set of similar bids for Yahoo, Neopets, and Geocities in an effort to buy up the rest of 2005’s hottest web properties. At $26.2B for 443M friends, Microsoft has answered a long-held question about the true cost of friendship: the answer? $59.14 USD."

[0] https://medium.com/@draftedapp/microsoft-ceo-finds-26-2b-und...

Geocities is 1998. If you want 2005 try digg.com

I feel like I should cancel my LinkedIn account now. Hrm..

/me done. finally.

Too pricey. They could buy more spambots with less $$.

I hope they don't do what they did for Nokia.

Good idea to buy LinkedIn, but for $26 BILLION!

Isn't that a million times earnings? Way, way over valued. You could hire a team and ad agency to make a better LinkedIn for $10 million...

Bye bye LinkedIn!

Is Jeff Weiner photoshopped onto the pic?

Why buy? Why didn't MS invest?

Every user gets .net endorsements

What does that mean to Scala?

I'm not aware of Linkedin maintaining any widely-used libraries or anything like that, so probably very little. (Hadn't they already vocally moved away from Scala and onto something newer and trendier?)

Why? Linkedin is kinda awful.

> LinkedIn will retain its distinct brand, culture and independence.

Darnit, I thought there was hope for a second.

wow, nice exit for LinkedIn. Microsoft now also owns Lynda.com .

One word: Clippy

It looks like you're writing a resume! Would you like to set your LinkedIn status to "Looking for work?"

Except this time Clippy's serving ads.

And my documents/presentations/spreadsheets are going to be cross-referenced with Linked-In? Sounds like a mechanism to put me one click away from accidentally sending sensitive info to someone working for a competitor.

Nothing about this sounds "delightful" to me. It sounds intrusive and risky.

its not worth 26 million lol

Two turkeys don't make an eagle

PIF Reid Hoffman (Paid in FULL) ;-)

very interesting news to say at least.

impressive

Satya Nadella has made a bold final attempt to stop LinkedIn from spamming him

"Bill Gates is awaiting your reply."

Naah, they'll just make him a default, like Tom on MySpace.

Won't work. Instead LinkedIn will now infect the OS team, and before you know it you'll get LinkedIn notifications during boot.

2 people want to add you to their professional network on LinkedIn. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Bullies buying bullies.

Infinite upvote!

You have this wrong. This is how microsoft plans on spamming the remainder of people to upgrade to windows 10

kullu the mullu sacking

"Your career doesn't seem to respond anymore. Do you want to restart it now?"

* You haven't changed jobs in 3 years, sending out 40 applications for you. You are welcome. - Same team that did Windows 10 autoupdate

"Sent your resignation letter" seems like the more appropriate action.

This is your enterprise agreement bot: We've noticed that 83% of your IT department has employment applications out with other enterprise customers. Here is the list of names and what they are looking for in future employment.

WOW, well-played, sir, very well played indeed. I may have to steal your snark.

While the downvotes are cute, why punish giving credit where credit is due? I thought their quote was very clever, and worthy of drawing attention to. Just saying.

Between Windows constantly pestering and even trying to trick me to upgrade to Windows 10 and getting LinkedIn requests from people I've only ever met once this is truly a match made in hell.

Windows 10 LinkedIn Edition

Update your LinkedIn profile with shell context menus!

I have a friend request hanging there for the last couple of years and I can't accept it or reject it :) Maybe Microsoft will fix it...

Awesome.... Sounds pretty interesting, Microsoft aacquired LinkedIn for $26B... Wao!!! Heavy amount.... Microsoft is progressing fine. Hope it would not be just like Nokia.

Someone else must've been interested. Salesforce, maybe?

Thanks for the downvotes! Theory confirmed two days after I posted this:

http://www.recode.net/2016/6/16/11958588/salesforce-also-mad...

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 strategy first to make a good choice...

* Exec A: Booooring. Let's just buy the cheapest one and be done with it. What's the worst which could happen? Gimme a bonus.

To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product.

More like:

* Exec B: Ok, I've *Binged a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by price, but really we'll need to come up with a strategy first to make a good choice...

I think googling was part of the joke

I think he meant Bing gives poor search results, which is why they bought LinkedIn instead.

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

It amuses me that they paid people to make their search engine look slow.

Hawaii Five 0 has cring worthy Microsoft ads throughout the entire show.

At this point, it's more like Microsoft's ad ground where shitty ads that didn't make it to youtube go to die.

Not sure why you're being down voted. You are completely right. I've found multiple people using a search tool inside of an app and then call it "googling" instead of search.

> Ok, I've Googled a list of top 10 social networking sites

Well played!

> and ordered them by list price,

Missing steps: opened Excel, created a new document, pasted them in, did 'Text to columns', clicked the 'Price' column header, went to the 'Data' tab, clicked 'Sort', expanded my selection to include adjancent cells...

They probably used google docs.

Ah, the armchair critic. I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboy, but things have been much better under Satya Nadella.

Like the forced Win10 updates, spyware, ads directly in the OS which you paid for, ...?

You not liking it doesn't make it a poor business strategy.

By that standard, Ballmer doubling down on the shitty enterprise software that still makes gobs of money was a good strategy.

But large numbers of people not liking it does make it a poor business strategy - not immediately, but it's the sort of thing people will remember.

Large numbers of people in the tech community. Most people aren't us.

I would think that non-techies would be even more confused and annoyed by their computer suddenly drastically changing out from underneath them without their permission.

And then they'd get over it. Oddly enough, my parents upgraded this past week:

Mom: Honey, what's this thing stopping me from [shopping]?

Dad: Don't click the button!

Mom: [long lecture about how she's trying to do stuff for her grandkids].

Dad: Fine, just hit the damn button.

Me: DON'T HIT THE BUTTON! I'll walk you through it.

I proceeded to explain it to them. 5 days later they don't even remember/care. I guarantee you my grandmother doesn't give a shit either, nor do most of my siblings. So far, I'm at a 6:2 ratio of not caring (one of my brothers is a developer). My parents aren't exactly ignorant in regards to tech, but it simply doesn't effect them to the extent it bothers you/us.

Most of us get repeated phone calls asking where the buttons went. Learning new things gets harder with age.

Apple's proven that the general population get over this pretty quickly, though. Look at their iOS 7 update.

One of my family, who isn't particularly technical, bought a pre-iOS7 iPad after trying out someone else's and liking it.

Soon it was running iOS 7 after prompting to update to the new OS.

Soon after that it went back to the shop for a full refund, because the person who had liked it before found the new OS and the things that broke in the process of updating that annoying.

Forced Windows 10 upgrade became a meme on 9gag ("Went to the toilets and saw this", etc). I learnt about the story over there before it was on HN. I'm not saying 9gag is representative, but I counter the "no-one noticed the forced upgrades". Even my parents did. Everyone noticed.

Most people have not heard of 9gag.

Most adults probably don't really know what a meme is yet either (they've probably seen a few, just don't really get it yet).

The hacker news/imgur/9gag/reddit demographic is relatively young. Some of us definitely suffer a confirmation bias from the misrepresentation of ages, especially given the significant population of boomers.

His point was that even on 9GAG, which does not have a tech-focused community, this is a central talking point, so it's not just the tech-crowd which is pissed off about this.

Sure, 9GAGgers are still at least capable of operating a computer or smartphone, but if you move even further down in tech-capabilities, it also becomes quite unlikely that those people will buy something from Microsoft to begin with.

Here's the demographics of 9gag:

http://9gag.com/gag/3325624/9gag-demographics

They aren't consumers. Beyond that, Microsoft isn't a company that targets individuals. They make their money from companies. They don't need to care about 22 year olds that have $100k of student debt and will pirate most software anyway.

9GAG does have a tech savvy community, that's my point.

Actually, to many adults who have heard of the word "meme" it may mean "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture", the intellectual equivalent of a biological gene -- not the newfangled meaning that the kids have hijacked the word for, "one of those silly pictures with text on". (Funny, didn't we already have terms for that? Poster, postcard...?)

It was originally coined by Richard Dawkins (way back, before he went senile); perhaps in _The selfish gene_. HTH!

There's also negative press as well that's immortalized on the internet, such as the anti-poaching NPO in Africa where the update took all their bandwidth and crashed their machines - effectively blacking out their surveillance on the poachers for a time.

My dad isn't in the 'tech community' but he'll certainly remember the windows 10 upgrade as it broke his computer.

Did he consider going for a Mac then?

But a lot of people who make purchasing decisions for their business are.

And a lot of people who advise non-technical friends and family on technical matters are, too.

Also, Windows 10 updates have broken so many things for so many people that it seems quite a few of my less technically inclined friends and family are aware of the potential problems anyway.

And the lobbyists have made the spurious practices, ala 'GatorWallet', OK for the "good guys" so it's no longer illegal, either.

A little late, but for the downvoters' edification, see if you can spot the conflict of interest when a fortmer Gator/Claria exec joins the DHS Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Comittee. Feel free to check the other members' agendas:

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?...

Or, here's the legwork done for you from 2011: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/11/30/bfp-report-meet-t...

I went to a store once, and their cash registers were down because a Windows update was forced on them. One was working, 2 weren't. A store manager was on the phone with some tech support guy and was not happy.

I went to a store once and that didn't happen. I work in a building of 1000 people. MAYBE 30-50 of them cared, and half those people still won't act on it. People are trying their hardest to find allies. When it comes down to it, consumers are perfectly OK with the status quo. The status quo is Microsoft doing whatever they want. "Everyone" hates Monsanto, yet they still are one of the largest companies in the world. "Everyone" hates Goldman Sachs, yet every retirement portfolio is filled with their products.

They shouldn't have been using the consumer version. I can sympathize, but that business both violated their license and ignored nine months of news and popups about the windows 10 update.

It seems we're talking about cash registers here. If their software happened to be running on Windows but the business bought them as self-contained devices, I'm not sure why the business staff would necessarily even have realised Windows was running on them, never mind been responsible for any software licence agreements or the like. The supplier of those cash registers might have made mistakes here, but the business staff are well justified in being upset at critical devices stopping working because of something like this.

iOS is the same, I see "update to 9.something" everyday! Same goes for iTunes when you plug in your phone.

Any time Microsoft is criticized for making the most boring tech out there, and looking like an uninspired company, there's always one person to hit back at Apple (and more often than not, the iPhone/iOS)

It's almost as if most software sucks. I often wonder why people feel the need to give into their tribal urges and pick sides.

The difference is when I update on iOS 9.something things will work.

When I update windows, I have to buy a new printer or, the headphone jack no longer works...

The forced updates are something that's been long overdue.

Imagine a world without old versions of IE that your webapps still have to support because else you're losing 10% of your users.

Or a world where a forced update breaks my parents' computer that was working perfectly fine before.

Without them, your parents' computer would just be insecure, instead. Unfortunately, keeping things static doesn't work so well with internet connected devices.

It would be nice if things didn't break with updates, though.

I will backpedal a bit and say though: it is never OK to arbitrarily reboot a system. Never. I'll also say that I would not use windows 10 for anything important.

The idea behind their update system is generally sound, but their execution is not good.

As opposed to a world full of legacy systems with security holes that are part of botnets.

Applying security updates by default would solve that problem just as well. From the user's point of view, there is no good reason to force updates against a user's explicit decision, and there is no good reason to push non-security/stability updates even by default.

The only time forcing all updates in that way makes a difference is when Microsoft wants to override a user's deliberate preference not to have their system changed in that way. This cannot possibly be in the user's interest, only Microsoft's.

Windows 8 was released in late 2012.

What can't be fixed by security updates, as opposed to OS upgrade?

Forced updates of minor versions, sure. Upgrading the OS to a whole new major version, breaking lots of things in the process is on a new level.

Forced browser updates are one thing, but forced upgrading of the OS?

Yuck.

Forced updates have destroyed the good feelings I had about Windows 10 and made it likely my next computer won't be Windows. Specifically, it's the unexpected reboot that infuriates me. I was running a long simulation overnight and in the morning my computer had rebooted and greets me with "Hi. We've got some new features to get excited about." Spontaneous reboots are NOT OK.

Or you have a fullscreen program open, say a video game or a movie. And bam. Computer just shuts down without warning. What the heck? Installing Updates. :(

Yeah, the forced upgrade isn't bad. The low quality of the new version is bad.

Yeah doing things without the user's permission is great. I just love it when my computer does a software breaking update for me.

Microsoft: Enjoy the safety (and the ads), because you have no choice.

I actually really dislike forced updates. In theory they could be fantastic as you will always be up to date on security and any additional features you'd get. However in practice they seem awful as they often break your settings, add additional ads/restrictions, introduce bugs, don't apply correctly, and happen at the worst time.

Forced updates are not acceptable. Whose computer is it, anyway? I don't care how useful you think it would be, if you try to force me to update I'm simply not going to use your software. No. My computer, my choice.

Might make people wake up and look at alternatives finally (can hope). I'm definitely thinking Win 7 is my last Windows OS.

The alternative all have their issue too. I think Win 10 has a lot going for it right now, it's hardly the worse OS of the major one available now days.

I just disabled forced update on my box. It was shocking that MSFT did not make the process straightforward. Ended up downloading a third party tool. Shocking!

Recent MSFT behavior was making me think they've changed. I guess not. This genius acquisition indicates the old MSFT is alive and well. Given the dollar amount, the good news is that they can't do too many of these moves without sinking their ship.

Spyware? Really? I can understand the updates making people upset (though they should update!,) and the "suggested apps" in the start menu (which luckily you can turn off.) But calling Windows 10 spyware is total nonsense. Do you think that every other major OS, including Android and iOS, OSX don't take telemetry metrics? You're insane. You could never improve the OS, if you didn't.

Google takes telemetry data from your search results, which frankly are far more invasive than how you scroll through your start menu or how often you use the action center. It's all anonymized, I don't see the problem. I certainly wouldn't call it "spyware," that just a smear and has nothing to do with reality.

They don't track your keystrokes, unless you are using Cortana, which guess what? So does Google/Apple/Amazon when you use their assistants. So you're going to switch to a competitor of Microsofts because they started doing what their competitors already did? Fantastic logic.

Just because something is normal doesn't make it right. And just because something takes some telemetry data doesn't mean taking any data is ok. Microsoft has done just fine with windows without taking all this additional information, so I just don't understand the argument that they need it.

Also, I think windows 10 is closer to adware than spyware. I think it is adware as it sneakily installs itself, and it has ads.

> Just because something is normal doesn't make it right.

That's debatable, but why should Microsoft allow its competitors have an advantage over them because of telemetry data? The collection doesn't do you any harm, it's not invasive. They aren't looking at your file names, or the text in your documents or your keystrokes. The only time they gather keystroke information is when you're in Cortana...which is literally useless without gathering telemetry for search terms.

> Microsoft has done just fine with windows without taking all this additional information

Except for losing marketshare and people complaining about UX and how OSX is better?

>The collection doesn't do you any harm

This kind of thinking sickens me. So you would be fine with me rampaging through your room and your house looking over your stuff, making a catalog of the things you own, the things you buy, what you do with them, at what hours, and how often, watching you eat, work, play, sleep, be with your friends, taking notes on who you speak to, at what hours, and about what...

Since, as you say, this doesn't do you any harm?

The collection Microsoft does is nothing like that, it's literally things like "did this users use the action center" or not. In Cortana it tracks your search, JUST like Google Now/Siri. It's not going through your documents or personal stuff at all. It's not even on the NSA level meta data, which I do have a problem with. It honestly sounds like you don't even know what it's tracking at all. Your analogy makes 0 sense at all. You might as well claim that "heat mapping" on websites is akin to rummaging through your trash.

I'm not sure how you're equating cookie-level tracking to being more invasive than OS-level tracking.

At least with a browser client you have control over how you're traced on the web. With the OS (that you paid for), you're forced to install some third party software and give it admin access. That's not a security problem waiting to happen at all.

> That's not a security problem waiting to happen at all.

You're right, it's not.

> I'm not sure how you're equating cookie-level tracking to being more invasive than OS-level tracking.

Google does far more than cookie level tracking. What do you think Google Now use? Magic?

You're not making any sense - you're claiming Google tracking is magic? Google, Facebook, or any other website doesn't get OS-level tracking, and are stopped cold by a generic adblocker.

Blocking OS-level tracking is a security issue because the third party software can be bought and sold to malware companies, who can push an update to infect your computer.

You don't even need ad-blocking, you can simply stop third party cookies. Firefox at least has this option.

I certainly wouldn't call it "spyware"

Do you have a better term for code that does user-unwanted tracking of their behavior, on any level, which hides itself from view, is difficult (in many cases impossible) to disable, and resists the will of the user when they try things like hosts file filtering?

The only difference between 3rd party spyware and Microsoft spyware is the stated intention of the author. Oh, and the former generally being easier to remove.

Somehow, we improved OSes and UIs before this kind of always on bullshit was commonly accepted. And I see it as a negative besides, it means that any "improvements" are always going to be pointed at the lowest common denominator, which has a habit of leaving power users out in the cold.

So iOS and Android are spyware? Apps that collect telemetry are spyware? Where do you draw the line?

I'm not sure what your point is. If the problem is that most of our OSes now contain spyware, by any objective definition of the word, that is an accurate statement.

I "draw the line" at the definition I gave in the previous post. Where's the off switch?

> it means that any "improvements" are always going to be pointed at the lowest common denominator, which has a habit of leaving power users out in the cold.

Power users usually remove any influence they might have by opting out of telemetry....

On the other hand, most people on the Windows Insider rings are technically adept, so maybe that balances out.

Of course, the Insider builds have a lot more telemetry....

> Somehow, we improved OSes and UIs before this kind of always on bullshit was commonly accepted.

Everything you do that involves Google (or Facebook etc) provides complete telemetry and those products are continuously updated whether you like it or not.

Now Microsoft has stopped developing stuff on a three-year cycle and switched to 6 months or less. (So you won't have to do any more Big Bang upgrades that take 18 months to plan and 18 months to implement, leaving you permanently behind.)

Either way, it probably makes sense to do more or less continuous OS updates when the OS is integrated with apps and online services (Outlook.com, OneDrive, Office 365 etc).

Have they? Business wise? Or because he likes open source (which is orthogonal and irrelevant to the discussion)?

Before Satya was CEO, it was normal to see a bunch of Nokia Lumia phones in every bus, tram or metro train in Germany. Right now it would be hard to find even one, and Windows Phone seems to be an abandoned project. So I cannot entirely agree that Satya is so much better as a CEO than Ballmer.

That's a pretty specific set of situational criteria by which to evaluate the head of a company that does a whole lot of different things.

Not really. It's not a secret that Windows Phone is now rather a joke, and nobody is buying it. It used to be very popular in Europe around 2 years ago.

Ballmer lost the mobile battle, not Satya, by the time Satya took control (Feb. 2014) it was too late in the game to make a difference. Just throwing good money after bad at that point.

Maybe that's why Satya is a good CEO. He pulled them away from an unprofitable money sink that was created by Ballmer.

Well, Microsoft has effectively killed off Lumia, and will be focusing on the Surface Phone and its OEM partners. They have said this year they will not be focusing on marketing Windows Mobile (frankly, it's not ready,) but I imagine once Surface Phone is made reality, they will be pushing the phones again, but mostly to enterprise and Microsoft fanboys/girls.

Microsoft actually created their own social network: http://www.so.cl/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So.cl

And Microsoft bought Yammer - an "enterprise social network for businesses".

Pretty sure so.cl was a demo for some kind of MS tech, rather than an actual destination site.

Speaking of Yammer, Knowledge Architecture has made their own platform on top of Yammer for an internal social network for companies.

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 tools with LinkedIn.

Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.

Edit: Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11920306/microsoft-ceo-sat...) "Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?" - anyone know what that means?

I feel like I keep up with tech stuff pretty good but I had to look up what Dynamics was when Satya mentioned it in his internal email.

yeah same, have no idea wtf Microsoft do these days

>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?

> I suppose it depends on which team gets the job?

I bet! The number of people in here that think a company with >118,000 employees is always going to make the same tech and design decisions is baffling.

That's because many decisions are caused by the environment, not the people. In the meaning that it's still the people doing them, but everybody on the same environment tend to choose similar things, and when in another environment, those same people tend to choose different things.

This is actually documented on management literature, with empirical studies and quantitative results.

That's a great point - though I bet there are many microclimates within Microsoft :)

Would love to read some of these management studies; it sounds intuitive but (as always) it's much easier to grok the bigger picture with concrete examples. Can you point me to some of the literature?

I don't remember most, but Peopleware has an interesting example.

About the microclimates, looks to me that how much of the environment is dictated by the top itself is one of those decisions affected by the environment. No idea how Microsoft is structured.

Microsoft doesn't have that many products that they can't get someone 1) high enough up the tree that people will listen to their comments and 2) with ui experience/common sense to check them prior to any acquisition/major change and make sure it doesn't suck.

Agreed. The LinkedIn UX is awful, but I'm not sure Microsoft are the people I'd want to address a UX issue.

Skype could definitely use some more love from the Product Dept. Perhaps we'll see an integration with LinkedIn? I mean most of my interviews from LinkedIn end up in Skype anyways.

I used to have a normal Skype in Linux. Then migrated to live: type of account (AKA Outlook). Now I cannot even access my Skype anymore because the outlook/skype don't sync properly.

I'm slowly migrating away from any Microsoft product. Luckily I closed my Linkedin account a while back. This is my new Linkedin: http://francisco.io/ (my own website).

Hello there fellow UPVer! You might want to update your links since http://spacehelmet.info/ is down.

Hi there! Yeah I should review it, a bunch of projects are old-ish

Your rich text editor demo is leading to a 404'd page http://francisco.io/editor. Your site is very nice btw

For what its worth, the Spacehelmet button that points to http://spacehelmet.info also 404's. Otherwise a neat portfolio site.

Random feedback: I spent a few seconds clicking around the arrow before scrolling down.

Skype has gone downhill ever since their first acquisition, and they've been acquired at least three times already.

If anything, MS is starting to slowly take it to a better direction, even though it is nowhere near the ideology of the original Skype.

I believe that LinkedIn will end up being a similar case, where it will continue to suck, but you'll see some slow progress eventually.

EDIT: As pointed out, LinkedIn will likely continue operating independently, as did Skype, which explains the slow progress.

it is true the skype has some issues since MS acquired them, and there were some changes/decision made on it which I disliked, however, it is performing better lately. hopefully it will turn around.

didnt microsoft remove the p2p functionality and made skype highly centralized?

Yes, but speaking from experience, that change resulted in a huge improvement in call quality. The P2P architecture is nice but leaves you at the mercy of your nearest node's internet connection and usage.

Not my experience. Having network issues all the time.

They did so because it was hard to do P2P for Skype on phones.

I figured that was just a figleaf and that the real reason was that this made it easier to intercept the traffic.

Supposedly, they also said that LinkedIn will continue to operate independently.

If we're truly lucky, they'll get their security folks to take a look at LinkedIn as well.

I just hope they don't somehow move the linkedin blast-email invite button to Windows 10.

I have no idea when people say Linkedin UI is awful. To me it is better looking, arranged and pleasing to look at than 99% of similar tools. (Monster, Glassdoor, Indeed, facebook)

On the other hand, I absolutely hate Microsoft's UI on everything from their Flat Design, Xbox Menu, (everything except Office)

UX > UI.

It might be pleasing to look at but it's quite horrible to use.

OK- Granted their UX sucks, if you use it for other than looking up people. I always suspected that may partly be intentional to prevent people and bots digging too much, scraping, misusing and using it for spam

Interface is more than just appearance.

They have actually put a very serious effort into making the UI and UX a lot better over the last 6 months. It's still not great but they have a usable mobile app and chat feature now.

Totally agree on the UX. Example: 99.8% of the openings I've seen on their job board in the past 4 months all redirect to an outside board, usually Indeed. Actually, I only remember finishing an application inside LI once, which begs the question: why aren't companies posting their jobs inside LI? It almost looks like they scrape posts from Indeed. Besides, one of the Premium features is "Featured Applicant: Move to the top of recruiters' applicant lists", which is basically worthless if no one actually applies through LI.

There are many holes in LI's UX which I'm hoping will get fixed after the purchase is complete. I just hope it doesn't break as Skype did (you're not the only one to feel that). Even though it's Microsoft, it's not Ballmer's MSFT anymore, so I'm hopeful. And if it does, there'll be a big gap for some other company to fill.

Yet, the chances this will go terribly wrong are much higher, just in general with "other social networks", but also given Microsoft's track record with multi-billion dollar acquisitions.

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.

That is basically steps 1 & 2.

Step 3 is you get an email (marketing or sales) because Dynamics notified assigned a task to a sales rep or started a job in marketing automation.

Then, based on you opening/ replying/ not opening the email, a whole new series of tasks are created.

If MSFT / Dynamics do this right, they will have a very strong Salesforce competitor.

Honestly, Linkedin by itself would have made a very strong Salesforce competitor. Not sure why they never went down that route, instead they focused only on recruiting, the least interesting use-case.

The complete rumor I have heard over the years was a gentleman's agreement between CRM & LKND

Seems like this is what they're going for - https://ncmedia.azureedge.net/ncmedia/2016/06/msft_announce_...

Honestly, this just sounds like a good reason to not be logged into LinkedIn ever, if I needed an additional one. Name and job title sent to random websites? No thanks.

My guess is that their longish-term strategy is to have everybody logged in to their platform when they are doing business work. Using Word? Must log in. Outlook? Ditto. They look like they are using SAAS to get the business software world back under their control.

You can't do it all at once, of course; you'll have some edge cases to deal with. But if you can manage it you'll have tremendous leverage.

they purchased probably the most useful enterprise social graph in the world, except for maybe fb

I'm honestly a little bit repulsed that a person could consider that scenario to be a plus.

Calling LinkedIn a business tool seems more appropriate. No one actually thinks of it as a social network anymore do they? (In the consumer sense of the term, not the graph theory one)

A business tool to integrate into sharepoint? What?

> 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 would be an ad - you might place an ad on LinkedIn, and that could be 'hiring via LinkedIn'. LinkedIn ads are relatively expensive, so I wouldn't fault you for not placing ads there either.

But to many, LinkedIn is just a database or catalog of people who you can reach out to (or who can reach out to you).

If you saw a LinkedIn profile that you thought would make a good addition to your team, would you not reach out to that person just because you found them on LinkedIn?

If someone approached you and said "I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I like what your company is doing, I'd like to get together and discuss the possibility of working with you", would you say no?

I expect the answers are "no" to both questions, but when we (in recruiting) talk about using LinkedIn for hires, we generally would agree that there are a handful of ways LinkedIn might be useful in the hiring process.

Well yeah, I think we're agreed. We might not use recruiters, but LinkedIn still helps us maintain business connections.

Which now are going to be part of some shadow profile inside Microsoft databases (à la Facebook).

I think my business connections data is the least of my concerns. It's mostly public anyway.

> If you saw a LinkedIn profile that you thought would make a good addition to your team, would you not reach out to that person just because you found them on LinkedIn?

There's a good reason for me not to have a linkedin profile. Recruiters somehow still manage to find me but this is fortunately less of a problem than it would be otherwise (judging by my colleagues and friends).

It's a bit like not being visible in google: if you can't google it, it doesn't exist. And if you're not on linkedin the laziest contingent of the recruiting profession will be unable to locate you. Fine by me.

Tangental, but are there any laws against SMS recruiter spam in the U.S.? Some recruiters have found my SMS somehow and text me with offers now. Mildly infuriating.

I don't know about laws, but your cell provider should have information about where to report spam texts, and those would certainly qualify. You should get reimbursed for the charges (since SMS in the US makes no sense and receivers pay for them).

Most recruiters view a LinkedIn profile as an invite to reach out to almost anyone, and many recruiters apparently are reaching out to people who explicitly say "please, don't contact me if you're a recruiter".

There used to be an "interested in" section at the bottom of profiles. It appears to be gone now, and you could check off things like "Career opportunities", "networking", etc. That section appears to be gone now.

Using LinkedIn isn't lazy for recruiters, it's smart - it's just the easiest way to find people. The easiest way to find active job seekers would be resume/job boards.

Recruiters who limit themselves to only using LinkedIn to identify potential candidates are lazy. Many devs could be found in a host of other places, and many like you don't want to be on LinkedIn.

The other reason recruiters tend to rely on LinkedIn is they can get quite a bit of value out of it even at the free level.

Managed to stay away from LinkedIn, don't post on Twitter, FB and still get calls once in a while. They probably scour language / platform specific mailing lists or look at conference attendance lists.

>> "I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I like what your company is doing, I'd like to get together and discuss the possibility of working with you"

I think this is my problem with LinkedIn, that conversation doesn't happen. I get connection requests and I'm left baffled to what their angle is. I literally scan the bio of the one connecting for the words 'recruiter' or 'business development' and then reject them. It's because I'm not looking to use LinkedIn for that reason.

Turns out it was this exact frustration that sparked the motivation to create a startup in my daily vlog.

Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGTowTy88dEKxrFibOimY...

I think these conversations don't happen because job seekers aren't really using LinkedIn in this way, at least yet. When I coach job seekers, I usually encourage them to use LinkedIn to try and identify companies that could be a fit similar to how recruiters use LinkedIn.

If you're a Python dev and you want to work within 30 miles of Dallas TX, you can do an advanced search on the word Python (maybe add a couple others) and then set location to Dallas metro. Your results will be individuals, and those individuals all should be working for local companies that are using Python (with some false positives obviously). That's a decent list to start off for someone, because it's not just companies that are currently listing open jobs - applying only to open jobs isn't the best way to find jobs.

  I get connection requests and I'm left baffled to what
  their angle is.

I think these are recruiters/business developers who don't want to pay for InMail or Premium accounts.

>I literally scan the bio of the one connecting for the words 'recruiter' or 'business development' and then reject them. It's because I'm not looking to use LinkedIn for that reason.

If someone is scanning the bio just to find out whether the messenger is a recruiter or in biz dev, chances are the difference between a free or paid account is trivial.

As a recruiter, I was reluctant for many years to use a paid account, as I received feedback from some candidates that seemed to equate a paid account with the most aggressive recruiters that overstepped bounds in LinkedIn. I eventually caved to get a paid account, but I don't know that the additional features are worth both (a) the expense and (b) any negative stigma that some may associate with having a paid account.

Not being a recruiter myself, I couldn't say whether the paid features are worth it, either. However, I never accept invites from people I don't know, especially when they lack context (i.e., an introductory message to go with the invite). The odds I'll at least skim an InMail message are higher, even if my responses are almost 100% of the time "Thanks, but I'm not interested right now."

That said, I log into my LinkedIn account maybe a half-dozen times a year, so I doubt my usage is typical. Take the above with a grain of salt.

> If you saw a LinkedIn profile that you thought would make a good addition to your team, would you not reach out to that person just because you found them on LinkedIn?

I'd never approach someone cold like that.

>If someone approached you and said "I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I like what your company is doing, I'd like to get together and discuss the possibility of working with you", would you say no?

I'd absolutely say no, because that kind of unsolicited approach means that you're just fishing, and that I happened to wind up in your net along with umpteen others. In other words, you approaching me via a LinkedIn profile doesn't mean you're actually interested.

OK. If you happened to be on LinkedIn and saw someone that had taken the time to put together an attractive profile (nice summary, links to GitHub and maybe a tech blog, their email address (contact me at...), a comment about being open to new career opportunities, all the niceties), and that person's skill set was a fit for a position you had currently available, would you just pretend you didn't see this person at all? Would you somehow try to find a mutual acquaintance? I'm not sure I understand why you wouldn't approach someone "cold" - in my example I'd say it's hardly cold (they are inviting contact), and I don't think my example is an edge case.

Your answer to the 2nd question is a bit more troubling to me. If someone stumbles on your profile on LinkedIn, does some additional research to see about your company, finds out it's a place he/she might like, why do you say this is "fishing"? You may be the only person this job seeker reached out to - why would you assume otherwise?

LinkedIn can be a valuable tool for job seekers to find information about a company - usually a bit more informative technically than standard company PR (other than a tech blog).

I think if you're dismissing candidates simply because you happened to see them on LinkedIn, or simply because they learned about the existence of your company via LinkedIn, you aren't doing your employer any favors.

If that's how it really worked then it might work out ok.

But this is the real world and standards aren't going to be kept that high. Even if you stick to doing things well, your competitors won't and they will turn us off you too.

I'm not entirely sure if you're referring to 'your competitors' to mean 'other recruiters' (not sure you realized I'm a recruiter), but my comment here actually is referring to job seekers interacting directly with potential employers without any recruiters involved.

I agree entirely with your second point. Identifying myself as a recruiter immediately is the end of conversation with many in the industry due to the actions of a growing percentage of recruiters. It's unfortunate, and one reason I'm expanding business into consulting with companies to help them attract job seekers without using recruiters. Candidates these days are often inclined to go directly without a middleman.

What other ways would you like a recruiter to contact you then?

I'm not GP but my answer to this question would be "I wouldn't"

Oh man, so much this. I get so much recruiter spam from LinkedIn, I just stopped responding altogether. One recruiter took to emailing and calling me daily, despite the fact that I never once responded to them.

That doesn't make me think you're interested in my particular talents. It makes me think you're desperate and a sociopath who has no respect for other people's time or wishes. If I wanted to talk to you, I would have responded after one of the first 10 attempts to contact me. Get a frickin' clue!

Did you consider responding and letting them know you weren't interested?

>I'd absolutely say no, because that kind of unsolicited approach means that you're just fishing, and that I happened to wind up in your net along with umpteen others.

No it doesn't. I've contacted companies who weren't advertising jobs a few times and it was because I had a specific interest in working at the company in question. In my experience people are usually quite pleased to get these kinds of inquiries, whether or not they have a suitable position. Of course your initial inquiry has to be tailored and not just some kind of generic "gimme a job please" spam.

That aside, who exactly do you think you are? Most people who are going to be applying for jobs are naturally going to be applying for jobs at a bunch of different companies. After all, it would be a bit presumptuous to assume that the first company you contact is going to hire you, and most people are able to identify quite a number of companies where they would probably be happy to work. Is your outfit really so special that you can demand serial monogamy from job applicants?

This was my point and you've phrased it well. How should someone try to identify companies they may want to work for (especially if geography is at play)?

You can search open jobs, but everyone is doing that.

If you want startups, you can look into PR and press releases about funding.

LinkedIn is great for this. As I wrote in another comment, go to LinkedIn and do an advanced search for some word that applies to your background (say 'Python') and within 30 miles of Philadelphia. You'll get a lot of profiles that come up, and many will currently work for companies that are using Python in your area.

Do a bit of research on those companies that come up, find an employee that does what you do (or a level up, or even a CTO at a small shop), find their email address (or ping thru Linked) and make a simple approach.

"Hey, I am currently exploring some new opportunities and while doing some research I came across $COMPANY. I'm not sure if you are currently hiring or not, but based on what I've read (ADD SOMETHING SPECIFIC HERE TO SHOW YOU DID AT LEAST A BIT OF HOMEWORK ON THEM) I'd certainly be interested in learning a bit more about the company. My background is $BRIEFBACKGROUND. If interested, I'd be happy to buy you a cup of coffee to learn some more."

I think that's a very aggressive line of thinking. You put your profile on LinkedIn. Someone else, looking for a job, is researching opportunities and likes what you are doing. They contact you expressing interest, and you blow them off just because they found out about you via LinkedIn?

>- There's a bunch of interesting opportunities for intrgating Dynamics, Yammer, and other MS tools with LinkedIn.

I doubt there are any "get $26 billion dollars back" opportunities...

its really about just returning margin on $27 billion. The deal isn't supposed to pay for itself now. To be successful for them, it only has to do better than the cash would have done in a standard portfolio investment. LinkedIn may be able to do that.

They just purchased a verified email address and complete contact address list (with phone numbers) for nearly every white collar worker in the western world.

If managed right, over the lifetime of the investment, this could easily make back 10x what they paid.

How? What would they do with a contact address list that would be so profitable?

Spam them.

Except I haven't gotten a gig in years from LinkedIn. I use it as an automated resume generator tool; I don't give a rats ass who sees my resume on LinkedIn itself.

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.

The problem is semi-persistent group chats. There are a bunch of partial existing solutions, but they all have issues:

* IRC: UX is pretty awful, any persistence of chats is ad-hoc and hand-rolled, plain text only, relatively high burden on sysadmins. * Jabber/MSN/Yahoo/etc.: very poor group chat support * Skype: very difficult to integrate with anything else, no support for self-hosting. * Slack/HipChat - good options, more or less contemporary, very much in direct competition with Yammer. Both more ephemeral though - IME Yammer ends up better than either, because it's just persistent enough that you can find old discussions/documentation when you need to.

I thought the same you described. Microsoft executives are not dumb, people talk about their failures, but they take controlled risks and are still strong. What about companies that do not take risks and never fail? The profit of this corporation is still impressive, even delaying to take some steps on industry and failing in some products.

Not just the UX but all aspects of brand and design. LinkedIn is hideous, difficult to use, buggy, and creepy. If MSFT can fix a few of those it'll be a win. If not it's hard to see the platform living another 5 years.

> LinkedIn is hideous, difficult to use, buggy, and creepy. If MSFT can fix a few of those it'll be a win.

Have you seen Windows 10 yet?

I feel you're implying Windows 10 is not a well-designed OS.

It's actually quite wonderful and usable OS, IMHO.

Well, it is buggy. Many of us feel that the lack of privacy options for non-enterprise users is somewhat creepy. And if you are the support person for less computer-savvy family members that have woke up to an unwanted Windows 10 upgrade, you will know that many people find it difficult to use.

Why not say it personally and stop generalizing and using "many of us". If it's buggy for you, say it for yourself. "I feel that the lack of privacy...".

Fortunately no. I've not used or seen a Windows machine (aside from old XP VMs I use to test ie) in at least 5 years.

While I'm a big Mac fan and moved to Apple products over 10 years ago, Windows 10 is the first alternative that I would actually consider using full-time now. I think the privacy concerns are valid and should be available to all, not just the pro/enterprise crowd.

The shittiest thing Microsoft has done with W10 is the way they handled upgrades. Nobody should be tricked into upgrading. Opting out should be easy and clear. The upgrade should never happen without the user affirmatively starting it. If the user has software already installed that will be disabled by the W10 upgrade, they should be asked to acknowledge that before the upgrade starts.

> Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.

Wait, what? Are you saying you want Microsoft to "Metro-ify" LinkedIn? Forget the OS, even, for a minute... Just look at what they did to Skype and Office.

Are you saying you LIKE their current UX ideology?

> I wouldn't personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn

Why? I don't care how someone got the interview, it's the person and their skills and abilities that I am going to assess (also recruiters get lots of work off my head, which is good, especially when our HR dept. isn't able to do it)

> I wouldn't personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recommendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn.

This seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction.

> Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11920306/microsoft-ceo-sat...) "Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?" - anyone know what that means?

He's referring to whether usage is going mainstream, shifting from early adopters to the general market[1]. He's looking at technology that's already big but has the potential to get even bigger.

When usage is limited only to early adopters, it's not useful to Microsoft since it's such a large company. But when general folks are also beginning to adopt a piece of technology, it's a sign that things are going right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

> Edit: Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11920306/microsoft-ceo-sat...) "Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?" - anyone know what that means?

In general English, "secular" means "non-religious."

In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."

An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn't keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.

An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won't feel it until advertising stops moving online.)

Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.

> In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."

It's not "MBA-speak"; this sense of the word "secular" is used in economics, time-series analysis, astronomy, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_variation

What's the etymology of that?

1250-1300; < Medieval Latin sēculāris, Late Latin saeculāris worldly, temporal (opposed to eternal), Latin: of an age, equivalent to Latin saecul (um) long period of time + -āris -ar1; replacing Middle English seculer < Old French < Latin, as above

In fact: century in Italian is "secolo"... :)

It comes from the Latin saeculum which is a period of time longer than a person's life. Rome used to hold the secular games, which was an event so big, it'd never be seen again in a person's lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Games

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum

A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or the equivalent of the complete renewal of a human population. The word has evolved within Romance languages (and Swedish) to mean "century".

> The word has evolved within Romance languages (and Swedish) to mean "century".

Doesn't that come from centum (100) like cent and centurion?

That's for Germanic languages. In Romance languages the words for century look like "seculo", "siglo", &c.

What they meant is that in Romance languages century is a cognate of secular: secolo in Italian, siècle in French, siglo in Spanish…

And secol in Romanian ^_^

> It's not "MBA-speak"; this sense of the word "secular" is used in economics, time-series analysis, astronomy, etc.

Of course it's MBA-speak. MBA-speak does not mean that they invented the word, or that only MBAs use the word. It just means that MBAs prefer to use the word where another one would do.

Nadella could have talked about "long-term trends" or "ongoing trends" or "sustainable trends." However, he chose to use "secular trends." His fondness for jargon makes him harder to understand.

Another example of MBA-speak is "synergy." The OED traces "joint action, cooperation" to 1632, and "a combined effect which is greater than additive" to 1904 ("synergism"). The first listed MBA-speak usage of the term is a 1981 article in The Economist on brokerage mergers.

Does that mean that "synergy" is "not MBA-speak" because the term is also used by scientists? Of course not! It just means that the MBAs adopted a term that others had already been using.

I would place "secular" into the same category as "synergy." The OED traces its astronomical usage to 1801 and its economics usage to 1895. Its first appearance outside a scientific context is in 1973, in an article in The Daily Telegraph on interest rates.

I presume "secular usage and technology trends" means "is its growth down to the fact it happens to be down to the market it plays showing strong growth trends even without hype and marketing spend associated with this particular company". Can only assume the secular trend he's thinking of there is growth in "business prospecting tools" which is the potential area for Microsoft to build revenue generating services that also integrate with their CRM and Office, and not the established and plateau-ing LinkedIn userbase, which is simply a potential strategic advantage for Microsoft products in that space.

Sure, Microsoft don't have a great record with their acquisitions, but the opportunity for them to generate more revenue directly and indirectly from this is huge.

Just wrote a post discussing this phrase and other interesting ones in his memo https://medium.com/@SVSpeak/deciphering-satya-nadellas-ratio...

Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.

Along those lines, maybe they'll fix the very broken email alerts for group postings. For quite a while, my experience has been that if I have it set to weekly digests I do get them weekly as expected, but if I set a group to daily digests I get nothing at all. So I get nothing at all for the groups that I have the most interest in. I opened a support ticket about it but got nowhere with it. I don't know if this impacts everyone or just some subset of users, but I've seen others complain about it.

I think it also has to do with their view on business communication. (lync or whatever they work on now, you catch my drift) With linkedin they can integrate that into their system and have a(nother?) unique selling point.

"Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn."

You buy the shades, and I'll get ready to search the registry for a lower case hack.

"Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn"

Why do you think that will happen? Azure had AWS as a model, yet the UX is not just worse but surprisingly worse. MS bought a product I was on, and I was excited to clean it up. The exact opposite happened; we were given no time to fix design problems, and instead had to pile on features. The MSDN site has been tired for almost two decades now. I feel as though we were talking about two different companies.

>> Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn

MS's UX - Like the one where they consider closing a dialog box to be a consent to upgrade to Windows 10? ;)

Satya's steps in the last two years have been very well thought out, so I don't think it happened like this. They seem to be betting on cloud first and foremost, and on businesses (vs. personal computing) after that. LinkedIn is really in the same set of products as O365 (in my head, at least).

They're also likely going to try and move LinkedIn to Azure, which they'll use as documentation on how to move large shops to Azure, using it as their Netflix.

...Because that worked so well with hotmail.

Twitter is the cheapest of the big networks. LinkedIn is entrenched in its market, unlike most of the others (including Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) Twitter I think would be a good buy somewhere, but Jack and his team seem inept and they probably want a massive premium.

When I first heard the news it made no sense; but after pondering, I think I know what they are trying to do, and it does makes sense. Also, LinkedIn was relatively cheap compared to its counterparts, I've already seen some shareholders raising some ire because they were trading a LOT higher not long ago.

Microsoft doesn't have a good track record with big acquisitions, but this is Satya's first and we have seen other deals turned down by him for being too rich. Salesforce being the prime example.

They paid with all cash (which was yielding nothing,) so now they get the benefit of a company that has pretty good revenues, is really close to profit, and they get a massive tax write off. It also integrates well with their core businesses and like I said, it's fairly cheap.

Let's not forget Satya has had some smart aquisitions lately. Minecraft & Xamarin. So, maybe it's worth having confidence in this one.

speaking of, how does LinkedIn make its money anyways?

Mostly subscription fees paid by recruiters for premium access.

About half to two-thirds comes from job listings, the remaining is split evenly between subscriptions and ads.

The outer edges of Twitter's user base will frighten off most corporate acquirers. Too much ISIS; too much political screaming; and a user culture that doesn't want Facebook style barriers to R-rated or X-rated content.

Big companies hate to be caught in the middle of controversies. LinkedIn's content is safe to a fault. Buying Twitter and making it uncontroversial would drain two-thirds of the value right away. Maybe more.

Twitter users actually spend time on Twitter, read status updates from hundreds of followed accounts, have it installed on their phones, etc. And at least for me Twitter has been much more interesting than Facebook. Because even though most of my friends are on Facebook, most of the people I admire are on Twitter.

LinkedIn on the other hand is, depending on your point of view, either a database of incomplete, mostly outdated and uninteresting resumes, or a circle jerk of HR folks and dubious "coaches".

People stay on LinkedIn because they are afraid of missing out. But really, it's a genuine ghost town, a once promising service that was completely destroyed by their monetization needs and most of us have classified LinkedIn emails as spam long ago, after realizing you can't unsubscribe from it. And the only reason I haven't deleted my account yet is because once in a blue moon I get to take a look at forwarded profiles. You don't get anything interesting really, LinkedIn profiles are boring, superficial and generic, but hope never dies.

> you can't unsubscribe from it

You can unsubscribe from all it.

https://www.linkedin.com/psettings/messages

No, you can't. First of all they are exposing like a dozen options, but without any way to tell them "unsubscribe from everything".

This means that they can keep adding categories. For example I don't remember an option for receiving invitations for joining groups. If this option was available I would have disabled it and guess what, it's now enabled on my account.

But far more aggravating is that I'm receiving emails straight to my Inbox from HR people even though I unsubscribed from such email. Do you know how I know that LinkedIn has sold my email address against my preferences? It's because I'm using an unique email address just for LinkedIn.

You know, I can use a menu, I can find a link, have been doing it for quite some time ;-)

is really close to profit

This is the thing I find hard to understand about these big corporate acquisitions. What multiple of "really close to profit" makes a bigger number than $26B?

If it's a start-up with obvious potential but relatively early in its life, or an established business that is currently reinvesting revenues on a large scale to drive growth, I can understand not being concerned about the profits.

But this is LinkedIn. It's not like it's a new company. It's already dominant in its market, and I don't see obvious potential for spectacular growth within the same area. If it's not already making big profits, what makes it worth $26B to Microsoft?

It has been growing 35% year on year recently, at $3b revenue. No reason why this could not keep accelerating thanks to effects from MS.

No reason why this could not keep accelerating thanks to effects from MS.

That seems a little optimistic to me. With LinkedIn in such a dominant position, there is only so far for them to grow in user numbers. That means they need to increase revenue-per-user as well to maintain anything like that kind of growth, but again there is only so far you can push with things like advertising rates before your customers can get better returns on their budget from other channels.

26B dollars itself isn't making any money, so all it has to do is make some money and its a good deal.

But in this case, "make some money" seems to mean "make more than $26B after overheads", since they don't have the original $26B any more.

Some asset probably complement Microsoft to give Microsoft profit. For example, LinkedIn owns Lynda.com. Microsoft could make all training for their products on Lynda free. This would boost Microsoft's products because their users are more knowledgeable and can use their products better, or brings in new customers because now they have free, quality training. Then maybe those users who enjoy the free Microsoft training on Lynda buys a subscription because they have other things to learn and feel it's worth the value...so this would increase revenue on LinkedIn side.

Yes, Microsoft could have achieved the same result by giving Lynda some $ per user that watches their Microsoft training...This is just one scenario...I hope they have more.

Week's top jobless people will now feature on the Windows blue screen.

Eum... What social network is really making money outside of ads and lots of it?

Yes, LinkedIn and it's also the most "business minded" social network. So it seems an obvious (good) choice ( don't forget, MS also bought Yelp - which was also considered a 'business social network')

There isn't any social network that has this much paying users.

You mean they bought Yammer. Yelp is still independent and publicly traded.

> To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product

Couldn't agree more.

LinkedIn has to be one of the most under-powered network out there. It's UX is still reminiscent of Orkut days. It's notifications and messaging system is the worst of breed. The network updates and posts on the "wall" are so bad that I stopped reading them years ago because it feels like spam. It prompts me every now and again to congratulate people on job anniversaries--maybe people do that but it's a weak play when a company reaches to those depths.

Looking forward to Microsoft cleaning this up but I haven't seen anything from Microsoft as of late that would inspire confidence on the web. I was at MSN circa 2004 and it has always had an inferiority complex compared to the rest of the industry.

LinkedIn won't bring much engineering talent to the table either. So revamping it will be a true test of Microsoft's resurgence into the web following a string of bad executions.

> It prompts me every now and again to congratulate people on job anniversaries--maybe people do that but it's a weak play when a company reaches to those depths.

So what? Facebook prompts me to congratulate on people's birthdays, and Facebook is doing quite well.

> Facebook prompts me to congratulate on people's birthdays, and Facebook is doing quite well.

So What? :) Snapchat compels people to post videos of their cats and daily humdrum. And it also does quite well.

You seem to be proving my point.

Apples and oranges. Also, this has been a common spectacle for me:

Click here to congratulate Jill for reaching her ninth anniversary at Yoyodyne!

"..But Jill left that company 5 years ago.."

Or better yet. Do you know Dave? Connect with Dave.

Dave died two years ago. Really don't want to contact his widow to make this stop.

ok, i get that it seems annoying, but why would it entail poor company performance?

Is that something you do every year? Congratulate your friends on their job anniversaries?

Congrats on the 30 minute anniversary of writing this comment. Good luck in your future endeavors.

What I don't understand though is why people (specifically on this forum) seem to hate these prompts so much. Sure, they're annoying, but I've always ignored them, and they never bothered me. Do you people automatically do what the talking head on television tells you to? Of course not. So why so much vicious sarcasm directed towards LinkedIn?

Facebook contacts are my friends, at least for some value of "a friend". LinkedIn contacts are not.

How does that distinction matter? Wasn't it LinkedIn's goal from the very beginning to make one interact with people who are not one's friends? (Otherwise how does one expand one's network if one merely interacts with the people one knows well?)

I wondered for a long time about the anniversary thing, then actually went and did some analysis on it. Looking at the data, it shows that people mostly tend to do leave jobs on year boundaries so contacting and targeting people at that time of year when they are thinking about changing jobs makes a lot of sense. You can argue the morals of it of course! Here's my blog on it : https://medium.com/@mrmattwright/workforce-analytics-happy-a...

I don't think Nadella understands either enterprise or consumer tech. The Windows 10 forced upgrades, privacy concerns, the milquetoast Surface sales, and the non-stop march of users shifting from Windows to OSX and mobile is a sign that he has no idea what he's doing.

I suspect MS is destined to enter a Yahoo-like phase of remaining semi-relevant via acquisitions and legacy products enterprise finds difficult to move off of. Skype, Linkedin, Minecraft, etc make little sense for MS to own especially at the incredible prices they paid for them. There's no practical ROI here for any of this. Lets call a spade a spade here: MS is just buying customers at this point.

The only rational move MS is doing is a me-too copy of AWS. And only because running Windows of AWS was unsupported for a long time and a PITA. People don't use Azure but because they like it, its because its the one that run Windows.

Nadella isn't the Steve Jobs of MS. He's, at best, the Melissa Mayer of MS. He'll stick around for a while, cash out, and leave a worse running company in his wake. Sadly, when investors demanded Xbox and other divisions be spun off, Nadella fought them tooth and nail. I suspect the investors were right and these divisions would have been more competitive without being tied down to the MS mothership and its questionable leadership and unbelievable spending.

MS has money for these buyouts, but where's its PSVR/Vive competitor? Why are bing results still terrible? Why is Win10 still unliked? Why isn't MS taking ransomware seriously? Why is its licensing still overly expensive and impossible to figure out?

I wish Nadella was more focused on fixing what's broken with MS instead of just buying customers, many of whom will end up leaving anyway when a new competitor comes around. There's no loyalty to Linkedin. In fact, professionals just see its as another nuisance in their lives if they want to maintain competitive in the job market.

Who is Melissa Mayer?

to be fair some get junked in to azure because of bizspark as well.

You are so right and yet downvoted of course. I think this goes to show the way Microsoft runs its business. Keep the world 10 years behind because people are gullible enough to keep using it. They would have been better off spending the money to buy Canonical.

s/Googled/Bing'ed/

No, I think that was the point.

Actually, I suspect a lot of honest thought and debate went into spending $20 billion, but who knows.

$26.2bn / 400mio user = $65 per user

Facebook paid $30 to acquire WhatsApp. (And afaik similar what Murdoch paid for MySpace.)

Not all users are equal, I'd argue a LinkedIn user is worth more than a WhatsApp user

"To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product."

I thought the same when they invested in "Facebook" and gave some kid with a website 17M or so.

And then when they overpaid for Skype.

I would not say "probably" any more. They are buying users. Maybe it's the only way they can stay in the game.

But, they could buy the users for a fraction of the price from any number of shady vendors.

Satya & Weiner (there's your sitcom title) were just on Bloomberg and explained the acquisition. I'm not exaggerating when I said I really could not understand what they were saying. It felt like they were just saying buzzwords without any verbs in between.

I feel like I am in a strange wonderland.

I really don't understand why business people use so many buzzwords. Do they really think we're all like, "Yeah, man! Cool!"? Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows sentences filled with business buzzwords are meaningless bull poop.

It's because they have nothing else to say. They really don't know why these companies are valued the way they are aside from these buzzwords they keep hearing.

LinkedIn isn't a hypergrowth company. Every professional I know has a profile on it and so is every recruiter. Their stock is below its peak. They make a paltry income as a mature company. So, all that's left are magical buzzwords to make you think "something is brewing that will eventually make money." Nope. MSFT gets conned once again buying a trophy.

Indeed. At what point does marshmallow fluff stop costing billions of dollars?

The enterprise world loves LinkedIn. Guess who makes a poop ton of money catering to the enterprise?

Well, they gave a good college try at interfacing with existing social networks. When Windows Phone 7 launched, the MS web/mobile infrastructure had fantastic interoperation with FB and Twitter - FB messenger was even their official supporty IM (kind of a snub to MSN Messenger or whatever it's called isn't it?) Then they bought skype and APIs shifted and things fell apart, but for a while it was really neat.

I'm not surprised to see MS say "screw it" and just buy their own.

Continuing my theory that Nadella doesn't know what he's doing. I don't think Microsoft learned anything from buying Yammer.

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Does this mean clippy is going to start offering me jobs?

If clippy makes a return, I for one back this move.

I'm reading many disparaging comments about this, but I bet if it were facebook or some other popular company favored by this group that made this purchase the comments would have a different tone.

Not really. Both are cancerous blights on the internet.

MySpace 2.0

good. disliked LinkedIn anyway

Ok, Linkedin is definitely dead :p

Sounds like Microsoft is going the Yahoo route.

Well, there goes that neighbourhood.

I think this will be a new source of memes.

New headline... "Bloated, behind the times corporate buys bloated, barely functioning social network."

Man, if you think Microsoft are behind the times then you've not been keeping up with them. In the software development world Microsoft are about as with the teams as a company of their size could reasonably be.

They are ahead. Asynchronous first class language support is sooooo 2011!

What a waste. What a waste. What a waste.

how many of you use Microsoft OR Linkedin ? Upvote if result is: NO

There seems to be a rather common misconception surfacing on every single thread about Microsoft, which could be summarized like this:

HN User => !MS user && MS user => !HN user

Would "Mutually Exclusive" be a better summary?

If this hypothesis is correct there are no HN users.

C# developer here. I use skype too. Had to downvote you

LinkedIn is a static and largely useless platform. I have been on it for many years, there has been no innovation, and I can fully understand why its share price has taken a beating. Microsoft are desperate and deluded. Who would want to own Microsoft shares - this company is finished, surely. If this doesn't indicate a bubble in tech, I don't know what does.

Assuming your premises are true (Microsoft is done, LinkedIn is done), this isn't evidence for a bubble. The stock of these two companies could be priced perfectly right for their current and potential profits, and yet they might also be doomed. This might indicate (again, given your premises) that Microsoft is looking to find new sources of revenue, which would result in raising their stock price.

By saying this indicates a bubble means you think LinkedIn and Microsoft are overvalued in some way. Whether or not that's true, this particular move isn't evidence of being overvalued.

Thanks for your considered response. You could well be right, but for the moment, I'd put a red-hot poker in my eye if LinkedIn is worth 26 big ones.

Long term, tech is a great place to be, but this is getting silly, surely.

Of course HN is mocking the deal like we know better without any form of analysis of the situation.

Isn't that a rather narrow minded reaction?

I circulated this to some of my friends and one came back thus:

So now, LinkedIn will turn SinkedIn !!

I'm kind of new here (long time lurker though), so would someone be kind enough to let me know why the down-votes on my comment above? That will help me know better when keep my trap shut... :-)

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