Microsoft Offers Concessions To EU Regulators Eyeing Its $26.2 Billion LinkedIn Bid (techcrunch.com)

Microsoft has offered concessions to EC competition regulators in the hopes of smoothing the way for its planned acquisition of LinkedIn. From an article on TechCrunch, submitted by an anonymous reader: An EC spokesperson confirmed it has received "a commitments proposal" from Microsoft but declined to comment further. Commitments, in EC antitrust nomenclature, refers to remedies a company can offer if the Commission has concerns a merger/acquisition may significantly affect competition. These can include proposing certain modifications to the project to guarantee continued competition on the market.The news comes two weeks after Salesforce (which itself tried to purchase LinkedIn) urged EU to take a closer look at Microsoft's takeover of LinkedIn.

Comments

Make linux microsoft again

[Anonymous Coward]

linux, the new platinum hooker owned by microsoft!

Re:Make linux microsoft again

[unixisc]

Why, does Microsoft get to do what SCO once tried, and preclude others from continuing to create forks of Linux?

Re:Make linux microsoft again

[Dutch Gun]

I'd have to look it up to be sure, but I'm betting the GPL would prohibit that.

MS, LinkedIn & EU

[unixisc]

How exactly does the EU get to decide whether one US company can acquire another?

Re:MS, LinkedIn & EU

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly does the EU get to decide whether one US company can acquire another?

banning them from the EU markets

Re:MS, LinkedIn & EU

[alvinrod]

How is LinkedIn worth $26 billion dollars? If the EU rejects this Microsoft shareholders should write them a nice thank you letter. Microsoft doesn't exactly have the best history with acquisitions.

Re:MS, LinkedIn & EU

[Harlequin80]

LinkedIn is very very well monetised. And it is on a recurring subscription basis.

Re:MS, LinkedIn & EU

[tlhIngan]

How exactly does the EU get to decide whether one US company can acquire another?

Well, presuming Microsoft isn't just acquiring source code and hardware, but also user data, then the EU can tell Microsoft what it can do with that user data. So Microsoft can acquire Linked In just fine, but the EU can easily come around as say Microsoft must keep the Linked In information siloed (at least for EU members)

Re:MS, LinkedIn & EU

[Anonymous Coward]

These haven't been "US companies" for a long time. The US is just a market they operate in.

Re:MS, LinkedIn & EU

[gl4ss]

LinkedIn is very very well monetised. And it is on a recurring subscription basis.

No it isn't.

26 billion is way, way too much. They could have acquired ARM-holdings for the same money. that is very well monetized, very popular and very much in an uptick.

the deal values linkedin at 50 DOLLARS per user - including all non paying users. it's a stupid price. ms just bought it because they missed out on some other stuff and because the execs at ms spend way too much chatting away on linkedin, because lync sucks.

Now, if you're trying to say that Microsoft wouldn't make a stupid purchase because they're microsoft then may I point your nose to the direction of all acquisitions they have done in the past 10 years. yes, very fucked up every single one of them and failed to turn them into money for ms and at the worst cases just lost them billions for buying a brand they're not going to use and engineers they just promptly fired. just face it, they have bought stuff stupidly, super stupidly, in the past 10 years all for "good reasons" which were all actually very stupid reasons to put billions of dollars into.

Microsoft has a great history of acquisitions

[rsilvergun]

as long as you focus on their actual goal, which is buying up companies that could one day effectively compete. Microsoft is not, has not and never will be a technology company. Sun was. DEC was. Look where it got them.

Re:Microsoft has a great history of acquisitions

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This is how you get word ants. Microsoft is a technology company. Linux is an OS. WIndows 10 is malware. Stop trying to make things more difficult than they really are.

Re:Microsoft has a great history of acquisitions

[gl4ss]

Microsoft is a technology company headed by a board that for some reason believed that their "platform" they were standing on was burning and they started buying "service" companies to counter that while at the same time burning their base.

let's face it, had they just made windows 10 into a regular operating system without all of the crap, had just put a decent start menu on there and had not broken all configurability about running services - they could have sold them at 100 bucks a pop quite a lot.

had they made windows 8 just a better version of windows 7, they would have sold that one quite a lot too. now literally only people I knew who installed windows 8 either got it for free along with the computer OR they needed it to run latest visual studio(for no actual reason at all except a version check in the sw, no doubt to prop up the install numbers even slightly).

Microsoft has always made their money from their technology being good enough, but spending 26 billion dollars on a 2.6 billion dollar company is just a symptom of how the board consists of idiots. total idiots.

and look, it's very easy to prove that they are idiots.

look at MS acquisitions for past 6 years. they are idiots. look at what they have tried to focus on and with what. they are idiots.

Buying Nokia Smartphones division only to do absofuckinglutely nothing with it: Idiot move.

Spending money on windows phone without bothering to spend it where it counts, while making it less feature rich than predecessor: Total Idiot move.

Using Zune as basis for a smartphone os: TOTAL Idiot move.

Fantasizing that they would get 30% of all photoshop sales by making an app platform that doesn't have the api's to EVEN FUCKING MAKE A DECENT PHOTOSHOP CLONE, totally idiotic. the single biggest idiotic thing about their windows8 launch was trying to push an app platform that could not do same things previous platform(plain old win32 apps) could! WHY WOULD ANYONE GET ON THAT!?? also as it happens Adobe pre-empted any such dreams with going with their own subscription cloud system at the same time as insurance against paying MS 30%.

Screwing up their chances on tablet market with releasing a tablet that can not have same kind of apps as competition: Idiot move (surface rt - it's shit and anyone who invested in that platform got burnt). the api's were and are severely lacking for doing anything mildly interesting - you might just as well only have a web browser, which is just as fine since you don't have a choice of what web browser you want because of the api's.

spending nearly hundred mil on trying to get developers onboard windows phone and said windows rt with incentives and flying "evangelists" around the globe dishing out free lunches with anyone who signed up: IDIOT MOVE, because said evangelists would just tell you that you don't need to have such and such funtionality in an API even when your companys application cannot be ported before such functionality emerges, he just said that I don't need to play mp3's in my app from the devices media library while my app is in the background(there were api's to play from the network, or from within the app while in background and to play from the medialibrary while the app was in foreground - why the fuck even bother with building a medialibrary api then).

they would also tell you how to make "games" using user interface components for sprite drawing and such, which is totally idiotic and frankly really fucking shameful. there I was waiting for the free lunch while this young idiot from washington was explaining how to make a game with 7 sprites and 5 collision boxes run "smoothly" on the platform - and that was billed on the agenda as low level knowledge of the platform - fuck, if you do that then at least if they had bothered to send someone who knew xna would have been nice! and wasn't so fucking stupid and arrogant! he literally knew as much as some guy who had been working with windows phone for two weeks would have known - and

It's a Trap

[WillAffleckUW]

It's not actually a concession.

They were already found guilty

[Dunbal]

Did they ever pay that $300+ million fine to the EU, or did that just slide away?