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Microsoft Officially Closes Its $26.2B Acquisition of LinkedIn (techcrunch.com)
After getting its final European Commission approvals earlier this week, Microsoft and LinkedIn today announced that Microsoft's $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the social networking site, has officially closed. From a report on TechCrunch: The news comes six months after news first broke of the deal. In an internal memo, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner went through the areas where the two companies would be working together, and how they will in other ways remain independent. LinkedIn today has over 400 million registered users, making it the largest social networking site focused on the working world. People use the service both to make work connections with other people in their fields, but also to look for jobs and hire people. As we reported earlier this week, the fact that LinkedIn essentially has a dominant position in this area meant that Microsoft had to make concessions to the EC about how it would work to allow other social networking sites to integrate on its platforms.
Not sure that I am super pleased about the MS takeover but I am certainly glad it wasn't Salesforce...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Maybe they can now help me find a job through LinkedIn. I am an expert in Rust and Swift.
... in the last week or so its changed so you now need an account on linkedin (or facebook) to be able to view anyones profile at all, never mind the details. I'm sure that has nothing whatsoever to do with MS wishing to get as much user data as possible.
I was looking to hire a few dozen Social Media Experts before the end of the year.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
LinkedIn today has over 400 million registered users
how many people have been active in the past 30-60 days and the level of activity of these accounts is always more useful than raw statistics. many of these are likely bots and callcenter employees.
largest social networking site focused on the working world.
maybe, but i cant think of a single peer or coworker that actively relies on linkedin for more than the occasional flood of cold-calls from indian call centers offering 3 month contracts for work in desolate areas of the midwest. size isnt everything.
People use the service both to make work connections with other people in their fields, but also to look for jobs and hire people.
retirees are often goaded into joining the site under the auspices that their former colleagues want to keep in touch. What employers really want in most cases is a readily available contract worker they can now re-hire at a fraction of their original salary and without benefits if and we needed to patch and maintain systems the former employee ostensible hoped to rid himself of. my work connections come from IRC and conferences, whereas I surmise large swaths of the indian subcontinent are merely warehouses filled with anyone fortunate enough to pass an english fifth grade comprehension test.
I feel microsoft has made another blunder. First it was Minecraft for billions, and its a great deal until you realize most people playing minecraft already gave their money to notch, and that theres no real way to monetize it without pissing off the players who have a very limited tolerance for things like in-game purchases or exorbitant hosting fees. sure, you can weave it into the learn to code initiatives but people who want to learn to code are already releasing their own indie games on steam...not laboriously building minecraft logic engines. LinkedIn seems like a great deal if you're stuck 8 years in the past. The truth is that its turned from social network into cesspool of random phishing attacks and cold calls. People avoid linkedin, mark the correspondence as spam, and move on to actually engaging past coworkers managers and friends for career direction. And when they want a job? they go to monster and careerbuilder where they can select a full time job offer with benefits and talk to a person with more than an elementary grasp of the language. Linkedin exists almost as a firewall for hiring practices that were outlawed 70 years ago but that unaccountably seem fair because 'gig economy.'
Good people go to bed earlier.
This is great news... ... I always hated LinkedIn, now I know it'll be gone in 5 years.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You are a faggot, so you are next against the wall to be shot.
Microsoft is synonymous with lack of security. Linked in is synonymous with lack of security.
Windows 10 is spyware. Linkedin is spyware.
Sounds perfect.
what difference does it make? That's the trouble with letting these Mega-corps keep all their profits instead of taxing the heck out of 'em. It sounds good on paper (after all, who are we to take somebody's money from them) but when they start throwing all that weight around you mega merger after mega merger. And thanks to upcomming changes in tax law they're about to bring 1 trillion back to the country and use most of it for mergers & acquisitions. We'll be seeing a massing round of layoffs over the next 4-8 years as these tech companies merge like crazy...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Looking forward to getting " wants to add you to their LinkedIn profile" right on my desktop instead of having to find them in my inbox...
that Microsoft will make LinkedIn useful instead of a just an ad/spam conduit. I mean it won't be like Win 10 which is no longer an OS but an in-your-face ad server.
I joined LinkedIn at the insistence of a friend and got an almost endless stream of link requests from insurance and securities salesmen - WTF will it be like under MS?
Wow, what language people use!
If MS bought it then it's already circling the drain!
And it was for a Managing Director position at a mega-bank that required a resume god himself would have had to fib on. Total waste of time. Recruiters only use LinkedIn to hunt for candidates that barely exist or don't exist at all.
There is no way in hell LinkedIn was worth $10M, let alone $26B. Everyone hates LinkedIn except for the shameless, self-promoting narcissists who use it. I can't see any value in that, at all.
Must have 25 years experience in Java and JavaScript, 40 years experience with IBM mainframes and IMS+CICS+TSO, and a target salary of $18,000.
Microsoft could use the LinkedIn platform to sell ads, and do targeted "advice placements" from weasels like Gartner, but there's also an interesting company-focused opportunity. If they can guarantee that users work for a company (maybe through O365 logins, or Azure AD joins of Win10 machines users post from?) they can sell behavior monitoring of a company's employees. HR departments would probably pay dearly to find out who's looking for work, likely so they can increase their efforts in managing them out, but maybe to signal to managers that something's not right. Companies might also want to use analytics to make better guesses on how much other people are getting paid for the positions they're offering. Right now, there's so much secrecy around salaries, and companies would love any tool that allows them to prevent giving out the occasional above-average offer just because they don't have perfect information.
I work on the systems architect side of IT, so I do both technical and some business work and I see how both groups of people use LinkedIn. For those who use it, techies use LinkedIn as an always-updated resume and contact list. Business types, especially marketers or consultants use it as a narcissistic self-promotion tool, more like Facebook than a utility service. I run in the techie circles but have plenty of LinkedIn contacts from the other side -- it's amusing to watch them posting some lofty inspirational MBA article, then falling all over each other to shower praise for their contact's "visionary thinking" etc. It's a useful display of the other side's typical behavior, and a good indication of how much a technical opinion of any kind is going to be respected. (Hint, to make a technical argument with a business person you have to wrap it in all the MBA and consulting BS these LinkedIn narcissists post.)
So yeah, I'm not 100% sure what Microsoft's got planned for LinkedIn, but I think they're just trying to gather up as much data as they can to feed the analytics machine. The Watson-style AI being sold by IBM and friends to gullible executives is this decade's free money machine for management consultants. Remember, if you can't measure it you can't manage it!
Our world is now ran by, and seems to increasingly love, those types.
Probably should have done it sooner.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
They learned the lesson from Yahoo. If you've got a company with no business plan and no idea how to eventually become profitable - if somebody offers you huge piles of money for it, you don't turn it down... you take the money and run.
#DeleteChrome
I guess MS is greasing Slashdot's palms quite thoroughly these days. It should be renamed Backslashdot, to be more open about who is the master.
Useless site. None of positions I've occupied since I've been on LinkedIn (in 2005?) came from LinkedIn. All articles I've ever read there were of traditional genres of "mastering the obvious" or stupid motivational tantra. All direct spam and phishing I received since I've been on LinkedIn came from LinkedIn. Microsoft once again has been up to its reputation of being managed by dimwits.
Engine block shredder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Twenty mentions of Microsoft on the front page, since when did this become the Microsoft Slashdot?
Now that Microsoft owns them it is time for me to remove my profile. I don't want Microsoft calling me or using my information for anything, period.
a corporation with lots of moneys and no ideas pays peak price to someone else's on the hope that some of the glory will mistakenly be attributed to them. Also see: Minecraft.