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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.
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
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!
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.