Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Is Buying LinkedIn For $26.2 Billion (microsoft.com)
Microsoft on Monday announced it is acquiring LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, for a whopping sum of $26 billion -- or $196 per share, in cash. The transactions, the companies say, has already been approved by both boards. As part of the agreement, LinkedIn will get to keep its branding, and will become part of Microsoft's productivity and business processes segment. Jeff Weiner will remain CEO of LinkedIn, and now report to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. In a statement, Nadella said: The LinkedIn team has grown a fantastic business centered on connecting the world's professionals. Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet.LinkedIn has over 430M members on its network. LinkedIn's purchase marks Microsoft's 196th acquisition of another company -- it is incidentally also its most expensive purchase. Four years ago, Weiner laughed at the idea of a Microsoft buyout. Update: 06/13 13:31 GMT by M :According to Bloomberg, LinkedIn shares surged 49 percent in premarket trading in New York to $194.63. Microsoft fell 3.7 percent to $49.60.
Less creepy? Try windows 10.
Microsoft buys yet another Internet giant.
Excuse me, I have to go delete my LinkedIn account now.
Their revenue is from a circle-jerk of recruiters. We placed a few ads with LinkedIn for engineers, but the results were miserable. Many of their problems can be fixed, but it doesn't look like that is MS's goal. This seems more like pissing away $25B, which is about what the drop in their market cap is equal to.
Yeah they make about $300 million in profit every year. This means that by 2100 LinkedIn will become a pure profit machine for Microsoft. Those guys think long term!
lucm, indeed.
From an article on The Verge:
While many financial analysts will be inspecting the details more closely, a lot of onlookers simply want to know... why? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sent an internal memo to staff about the LinkedIn acquisition, and it attempts to answer why the company is interested in the social networking giant.
Nadella hints that LinkedIn will help play into its Office software in the future. One feature will be LinkedIn's newsfeed "that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you're trying to complete." Nadella sees a future where LinkedIn can be more intelligent and feed into Office 365. "New opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising," says Nadella.
Google contacted me for an position based upon my LinkedIn profile. Several of my friends who have their own companies use it pretty much exclusively when looking for new candidates.
I'd say there's at least a little validity to what bengoerz has said. I don't know how accurate the numbers are but it's quite clear that LinkedIn has growth potential in the area of recruiting.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
The problem is that neither their claimed experience nor their professional social network are authoritative... both can be made up, and in my experience, LinkedIn is just a list of people who want to establish the maximum number of connections, regardless of the reality of the professional connection. I last signed in to LinkedIn probably 3-4 years ago, but when I was actively using it, it was easily 50:1 people who I had never met or heard of who wanted to connect with me.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
When trying to download my data from LinkedIn now I get "Maximum Transaction Time exceeded".
I can imagine that there's a crapload of people trying to bail out now!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Of course the info is stored.... do you think they would willingly let you delete the data that makes them valuable?
Your Real Name, Real Resume, Real Job History, Real list of working acquaintances, Real Address, Real Phone number, and possibly Real Salary history is too 'mine-able' when added to the win10 telemetry, skype info, online 365 info.
Now all that Real Data belongs to MS. And there's nothing you or I can do about it.