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threeseed

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.

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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.

> 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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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

Yup and Rapportive too.

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