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Comment by ivoras | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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? ;)

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.

> 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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

Week's top jobless people will now feature on the Windows blue screen.

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.

$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.

Actually, I suspect a lot of honest thought and debate went into spending $20 billion, but who knows.

But, they could buy the users for a fraction of the price from any number of shady vendors.

s/Googled/Bing'ed/

No, I think that was the point.

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.

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.

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