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.

Comments

And Salesforce throws a tantrum

[The-Ixian]

Not sure that I am super pleased about the MS takeover but I am certainly glad it wasn't Salesforce...

plenty of ways to waste your money.

[nimbius]

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.'