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Comment by rahoulb | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft didn’t buy LinkedIn (or GitHub) to grow their business.

Linkedin was because everyone needed to have a “social” strategy back then and apart from maybe Dynamics, there’s no real synergy (I don’t like that word) between LinkedIn and Microsoft’s other businesses.

The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.

In both cases tight integration with the rest of the organisation makes less sense than Salesforce buying Slack - which is something that could be tied directly into Salesforce’s core business.

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Github acquisition is a little more than this. There are VSCode and Azure linked to this acquisition, and to spin and link them together. From closely coupled to at least a little far away.

I won’t be surprised if soon you can spin your backend on Azure in 2 clicks from VSCode because your code is on GitHub. Stuff like that. Maybe it won’t be advertise on the GitHub directly. But for sure it will be there available in 2 click on the Azure and VSCode.

Exactly. Does anyone still remember Salesforce Chatter [1]?

Buying Slack was Salesforce's way of getting back into that market.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/salesforce-takes-chatter-m...

Oh I do _remember_ this pile of shit. A couple of PHB's from a sibling org are trying to push it down on us each and every year. We send them a lovely slide deck that describes how awful the software is, and that's it, we're allowed to use gitlab issues for one more year.

> The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.

I think that's a surface-level interpretation of the benefit to Microsoft. Azure and GitHub CI are a great match for using idle server compute for one and Codespaces is another.

I wouldn’t be surprised if ms bought linkedin purely (or partially) for the legal access to the user dataset.

Isn’t Yammer still a thing?

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