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Comment by verytrivial | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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