Integrating Microsoft and LinkedIn
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
I don't love them owning my "job-searching" identity too.
Seems like the most valuable service they have to offer is to corporations. "Want to know how often your employee is updating their resume? Pay us for access." Of course they'll spin it differently, but in short that's the value.
It has happened before.
Even I was shocked how tens of thousands of companies handed over mind blowingly valuable customer data to Facebook. They aggressively promoted their Facebook Page to their customer base: please like us on Facebook!
What did Facebook do? They took that data and sold it to competitors as ad inventory. I never saw a single company owner complain. Companies spent millions of dollars and years of effort building up a customer base, and just handed it right over to Facebook.
To put it in more blunt terms, Facebook stole companies assets through social engineering. I saw friends turn around and build profitable, multi-million dollar businesses through this single data usurpation channel.
Will companies get more savvy about locking down their data? I'm not counting on it.
The rest of your comment is spot on though, so thanks for posting it.
This is tough stuff.
It isn't that hard :)
I was deliberately and enthusiastically nodding with the "we are not the property of our employers" bit. Then you dropped the O-word and now, mostly because I'm curious to the point of disaster, I think I actually kind of need to see one argue that 'poach' is carte-blanche "offensive".
/s
MS certainly treats Windows users like cattle so there is always a possibility that they would do something similar with job seeker or employee data. There is nothing offensive about pointing out unethical practices of such companies or the potential to abuse the data.
When the acquisition was first announced, I stated that Salesforce should be very concerned.[0] Account-based marketing (what they're calling "social selling") is how successful startups (and others) sell to enterprises these days, and they're willing to shell out cash to software that helps them do that.[1] Having consulted many enterprise SaaS companies, I know that having the LinkedIn social graph integrated into their CRM would be worth the hassle of switching from Salesforce to Dynamics 365.
[0] Same reason why I'm selling my Salesforce holdings today.
[1] See dozens of VC-backed ABM software companies sprouting up everywhere and charging $xx,000 annually.
Yeah, LI messages aren't as important to most people as plain email, but LI messages are used for a lot of recruiting and B2B sales stuff. Think about it like this: if I compete with Microsoft, why would I want to continue using LI to contact potential customers (or potential employees for that matter) thereby giving MS access to so much important info?
I wonder if all it's going to take to trigger a mass exodus away from LinkedIn is the emergence of a truly viable competitor?
OTOH, maybe most people only use LI as an online Rolodex and maybe it'll all turn out to be a moot point. But it still seems dodgy to me to have a major industry player like MS owning LinkedIn. I think I'd find it questionable if anybody else had acquired them as well, although Microsoft's history does add some emphasis to the whole thing in my view.
A more curated social recruiting site is a pretty big potential if one were built... I keep hoping that Stack Exchange will move their careers stuff more in that direction, as they've been one of the better options imho as a developer, but they just don't have the critical mass even in the niche of IT.
Frankly, all the job sites suck... any number of them could make the move to a better UX for all concerned, but part of that really needs to be the empowerment of saying, "Hey, I'm not looking and have been where I am less than a half a year, let me be." That's another thing I wouldn't mind seeing... a place to post your resume, your phone number and email address... A recruiter could put in your email address, or phone number, and it give them your current status, the latest resume and that's it... just an update mechanism to avoid contacting people who'd rather not be bothered. Then they could pay for a hot feed when a resume gets updated, and/or someone marks themselves as passively looking, etc.
I think it comes down to more quality engagement on both sides... It gets tiring to get the constant phone calls for 3 months after starting something, and 3-9 months away from your project coming to an end... that doesn't even consider the FTE-types that will stay somewhere for several years before considering a move.
That does not jibe with my experience at all.
And it goes beyond the messaging thing anyway. LI hosts job postings directly, and has a lot of internal information about all sorts of companies. Now you might say "well, somebody could mine that stuff anyway", and that might be true. But the LI API has some limits and scraping is a PITA.. but now MS has the data with direct access, which makes it far, far easier for them to do something nefarious with it if the urge strikes.
And as much as MS have changed, seemingly for the better, of the past few years, there's still a lot of reason to consider the reasoning behind the old saw "The two biggest tactical mistakes you can make are staging a ground invasion of Russia in the winter, and partnering with Microsoft".
While I hole heartily agree with that line of reasoning, in this instance they are buying LinkedIn, not partnering with them. Skype is still alive.
My problem is that LinkedIn is an overvalued property. I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO.
And mark my words, but Facebook will eat their lunch. Maybe that's why Microsoft bought LinkedIn, as a defensive move. Time will tell.
Right, the point referring to that old saw was more of a comment on Microsoft's trustworthiness in general. That is, it is a suggestion that Microsoft are not to be trusted in terms of what they might do with the LI data.
I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO
Yeah, that's true.
* LinkedIn identity and network in Microsoft Outlook and the Office suite
* LinkedIn notifications within the Windows action center
* Enabling members drafting résumés in Word to update their profiles, and discover and apply to jobs on LinkedIn
* Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties
* Enterprise LinkedIn Lookup powered by Active Directory and Office 365
* LinkedIn Learning available across the Office 365 and Windows ecosystem
* Developing a business news desk across our content ecosystem and MSN.com
Few of these features benefit the user.
Good reason to switch to LibreOffice, if you haven't already.
(My last Microsoft Office purchase was Word 97. LibreOffice is pretty good now, although the early years of SunOffice and OpenOffice were painful. I liked Windows 7, and I still have one machine running it, but everything else is Linux now.)
I think the web options for office will probably be good enough for most, which is why they pushed that way in light of the google docs properties. This is where the money will be made for MS in the next decade to be sure.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t integrate things, it’s just that I usually do so on my own terms. In my experience, 3rd parties are pretty bad at guessing exactly how I want two things to work together. I would rather see services remain open, with several options for tying them together, than have a monolith decide on exactly one way to do it that serves primarily their interests over mine.
I don't think LinkedIn brought any value to me or to my career.. I didn't find a better job and frankly I probably don't want the job that someone on LinkedIn is offering.
$ 26B / 450M users ~= $57 / user
That's how much MS paid for my account. So they think it's valuable, but not for me.
I figure as long as I am careful and use reasonable op-sec, using LinkedIn can't hurt, even if it doesn't really help much.
Err... I'm not sure I like the sound of this. Isn't this just for application updates / system stuff?
Either that or you're living in a parallel universe where LinkedIn is a completely different company.
• Enabling members drafting résumés in Word to update their profiles, and discover and apply to jobs on LinkedIn
• Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties
I can't help but feel that the direction they're taking this in will be horrible for the Microsoft experience. It looks like they're trying to monetize LinkedIn integration in Windows…
Would you like me to share it with every recruiter in your extended network? How much are you willing to pay that I don't share it with your coworkers?
Love, Linky.
I like a lot of the stuff MS is doing these days, but this one really doesn't make sense to me. One has an enterprise vision and the other is "extraprise?" It's a very awkward fit.
LinkedIn account: closed.
Any ideas?
Then Microsoft bought them, and the usability has been steadily going down since, until I eventually was forced to abandon it: it couldn't even handle plain text ASCII e-mail properly any more (\n's would be eaten and sent e-mail would end up being one huge line).
But of course, it will be all different with LinkedIn this time. Of course it will.
Oh, gods. Please no. : [