These corporations assume they can do it all on their own, as they have billions of dollars and great engineers.
Still, it's quite useless: greed is what really drives true innovation.
Good luck Linkedin
This should be a golden age of software but its increasingly resembling a wasteland. Most software is being herded in to app stores which Apple and Google completely control and dominate, and which has reached a saturation level of app developers.
Interesting companies keep putting out awesome API’s, lure in suckers . . er . . developers, only to crush them after the developer has sunk a bunch of time and and money developing for them and about the time the company has developed enough momementum that they don’t need third party developers unless they are fully monetized partners.
And then of course there are the patent trolls.
If something like this is driven by lawyers, that's ridiculous: they advise, not prescribe.They are tools, not the brain manipulating the tool.
Investors .. maybe. But, why would investors be so myopic? Or rather, do such myopic investors have enough control to push this?
To me it sounds like linkedin leadership saw how much they were making from recruitment and decided to open up the sales side of the business too. And, instead of competing for sales data enrichment, they decided to make it a one-player game.
Whatever. Time to buy linkedin stock, and set a reminder to sell in 1-2 years.