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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.

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 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.

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.

> 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...

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.