Eh?
I see no synergy here. Unless MS are tying to either get into social media and turn LinkedIn into a Facebook clone and/or they're going to use it as a Windows 10 download path... ;)
Microsoft is swooping in to buy CV and soapbox site LinkedIn, in an all-cash deal worth a whopping $26.2bn. The software giant is paying $196 per share for LinkedIn, a $61 premium on the enterprise social platform's closing price on last Friday. Jeff Weiner will remain CEO of LinkedIn, reporting to Microsoft’s CEO Satya …
I use LinkedIn all the time, I find it a very valuable professional resource. And unlike others here I am rarely critical of Microsoft.
But I can't see this as anything less than a complete and total disaster. I see MS using this to try to start to build a Google-type information-sharing, privacy-ripping empire. I see MS demanding everyone have an outlook.com email address the same way Google services require Gmail. I see my LI email address being spammed to high heaven while my privacy is violated more times than a stripper in the VIP room. I see LI features that only work if the Win10 app is installed. Nothing good can come of this.
> I see my LI email address being spammed to high heaven while my privacy is violated more times than a stripper in the VIP room.
But surely it will be like Skype, now that MS own that I get a never ending stream of beautiful women wanting to be my friends. With LI, then I'll get a never ending stream on "professional" women wanting to be my friend "professionally"
Past performance is usually a good indicator of future performance. (See LI profiles for clarification of the general principle). MS could easily write off a past loss of ($8 bn - Nokia), but a future loss of $26 bn really will scare the shareholders. I suspect there will be many more than 1,850 unfortunate profiles looking for new jobs this time.
Just a question of when?
Presumably the supposed "synergy" is harvesting personal data - to what end I'm not entirely sure but it seems to be the fashion nowadays. Still, considering MS's recent performance (technical and business), I can't imaging they will actually be able to achieve this.
The only real beneficiaries of this deal are LinkedIn shareholders though there will be some small benefit for those of us who find LinkedIn irritating, as it gradually declines and MS eventually declares it to have been "superceded" by something utterly unrelated like WCF or Surface.
"a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on"
So basically they are going to open up all your [private and confidential] Office365 content, scan it for interesting keywords and phrases, and serve up adverts based on this. May be they have been doing this already?
"Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you're trying to complete"
Sounds like cyber espionage to me: company A is working on secret project X, gets a notification that company or person B is also working on a similar project. That's the sort of leak that would normally get you in court under the terms of your employment contract or NDA.
"I see no synergy here."
I do, sort off. You see, before we had Microsoft accounts which granted you access to their services we had MSN. Microsoft Network. It was basically rolled into Hotmail but in the end it was still MSN, and much more than a media site alone. It was a social media network on its own, but without the more intruding stuff which you had in areas such as Twitter and Facebook. In fact: this was the only social media network I somewhat used. Heck; together with MSN Messenger things simply worked.
Well, we all know what happened next. They bought Skype and that was suppose to replace MSN Messenger, the whole MSN network also got dumped in favour of Microsoft accounts and that was basically it. Skype would replace some of the functionality (I never liked Skype though) and using outlook.com you could "somewhat" use social-media alike stuff.
So here we are. Instead of expanding on something they already had and trying to perfect it they dumped it in favour of stuff which a lot of people never cared for. And now they're trying to re-invent the wheel using LinkedIn. Of course at a time where lots of people have given up on this as well.
I have to give Microsoft some credit: if anyone can make something out of the mess which is LinkedIn right now it's Microsoft in my opinion. They certainly have the potential. Only problem: will anyone actually care?
Way back I knew a relatively senior engineering manager who was temporarily redundant. He got a job as a recruiter, a seemingly odd move. His take on this -- "If I want to have the pick of the apples then I'll get a job at the market". That's exactly what happened -- he got a nice job out of it.
Linkedin is not just a social media website, its network of developers can not only help you cherry pick the ones you want but it can also give you a very good idea what another company -- a competitor maybe -- is up to.
I see no synergy here
It's in the letter sent to all MS staff in the justified hope that someone would email it to the press (you can't really call it leaking as it was clearly intended for public consumption).
"new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising"
Or, translated, it'll be harder to see anything on LinkedIn without advertising in headers, footers, popups, pop-unders and "on exit" messages, and probably also on your image. Secondly, as LinkedIn is entirely US based you will have absolutely zero control over the data they have, and my experience suggests that LinkedIn has never deleted anything I removed, only made it unavailable to the website (the continued accuracy of suggestions of people to hook up with gave it away).
In addition, they will most likely attempt to move everyone into "professional" and so try to charge you for the fact that you are supplying personal data - MS has gone so keen on subscriptions that it even decided to play nice with Linux until it has enough people hooked (ask the educational establishment how that well that panned out for them).
On the plus side, it takes exactly someone like Microsoft to ruin the thing and re-open that market for competition.
Maybe Xing will thus finally take off.
That is the full explanation of the market's response. IT'll go back up (maybe higher) in a few days.
Higher on exactly what basis? Having liquidated businesses like aQuantive in a failed c$5bn attempt to be like Google in adds, having liquidated Nokia in an c$8bn attempt to be like Apple, now they want to repeat the trick burn $26bn to be like Facebook?
Tell us how the markets are going to see this as a positive?
Sorry. I didn't mean to infer the market was going to do something SENSIBLE.
MSFT will recover this 2% in little time. Why? I dunno. Why was it so well valued to begin with?
If it is such a porr business decison and the market is such a good judge of, well, anything, then why was the devaulation so small when the cost was so significant?
This adjustment is a rounding error.
@BasicChimpTheory
This adjustment is a rounding error.
I agree. While the shares are slightly down over a couple of days ago, on a larger timescale its not really noticable.
Using share price to gauge the long term value of a business decisions always seems a bit irrational to me.
"The market saw MS drop 1/4 of its cash reserves on a single asset. That is the full explanation of the market's response."
I must admit, overpaying by such a huge amount for a social network, I expected to see a more significant drop in MS share value. If this all goes pear shaped I can see shareholders suing. I'm buying shares in popcorn!
@Sammy Smalls
"Maybe I'm wrong, but there must be something better to spend $26B on."
Oh absolutely, I would have thought porting everything they have onto Linux (Office, etc) would be good - they'd get more sales probably.
Of course, to me the dream would be to just have the Windows 7's UI as a Desktop manager on top of a Linux distro and get AD ported to Linux and then we'd never have to see Windows on the server or desktop ever again.
[Reluctant] Windows User [at work] icon
Alternatively, throw $25 billion in a fire and buy linked in with the final billion?
Of course, to me the dream would be to just have the Windows 7's UI as a Desktop manager on top of a Linux distro and get AD ported to Linux and then we'd never have to see Windows on the server or desktop ever again.
This would just teach you to hate your Linux distro instead of Windows.
there must be something better to spend $26B on
Well, that amount of money would have bought nearly 4 Nokias - and despite the burning platform crashing in Microsoft's ownership that money at least bought Microsoft something it could have built on and some tangible assets.
But LinkedIn? An evanescent user base and 10,000 employees with titles like Talent Solutions Solutions Consultant (I kid you not)? Whose operating income is increasingly negative?
"But LinkedIn? An evanescent user base and 10,000 employees with titles like Talent Solutions Solutions Consultant (I kid you not)? Whose operating income is increasingly negative?"
Perhaps that position could be replaced by a contractor. A Talent Solutions Solutions Consultant Consultant, if you will.
or rather what people are posting on LinkedIn as "hot skills"
I've got a number of endorsements for the things I do - the vast majority from people who've never seen me do those things. I've even got an endorsement for something I can't do (from several different people).
Yep - LinkedIn is a real goldmine of valuable information...
Vic.
I've got a number of endorsements for the things I do - the vast majority from people who've never seen me do those things. I've even got an endorsement for something I can't do (from several different people).
Me too!
Recommendations were bad enough with mutual back-slapping by people you'd never ever want to work with, but the endorsements are just a joke.
You might want to check that again. Yahoo Finance has LinkedIn's Diluted EPS at -1.3 for the past year and their profit margin at -5.27%. Sure their quarterly revenue growth is nice but still you wonder how long that will last.
With any luck, Microsoft golden touch will make LinkedIn collapse, and I will no longer have to wade through all the spam they sent me over the years, with a faked From address and everything.
On the other hand, Microsoft probably wants to borrow their expertise for the GWX marketing campaign: nothing like an e-mail appearing to come from your boss and urging to you to install W10 ASAP.
With any luck, Microsoft golden touch will make LinkedIn collapse, and I will no longer have to wade through all the spam they sent me over the years, with a faked From address and everything.
Interesting, I get next to no spam from LI. Not sure what I did because I haven't blacklisted it. Oh yes, I recall, I stripped the profile until it only had a single line of data. That keeps my name in use, but anyone wanting any real data will have to get in touch - and that account has a rather heavy duty spam filter on it.
I also have a fake account, and it's very funny to see the link requests come in even though I made the name borderline weird :).
@AC How weird?
Us brits do love some of your strange US names (assuming your from the Federal Republic of Trump)
My favourites are Cheese,Chow and Danish but maybe because it's food.
Full list here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2520431/Everybody-loves-Cheese-Weirdest-baby-names-2013-inspired-dairy-zoo-animals-breakfast-pastries.html
(From the Daily Mail, so it must be true)
Despite this story being upgraded from News Bytes to full article I still can't believe it. $26bn? Phew. Really? Wow. My flabber is well and truly gasted! I still can't see any reason other than SatNad is trying to out Balmer, Balmer in one go by consolidating all his CEO ass hattery into one single massive value bonfire fuck up?
For those that don't recall - here's El Reg's recap of Monkey Boy's acquisition blunders. SatNad's MS is offering $26.2bn for LinkedIn yet the first three in that El Reg list of Ballmer's mistakes (Nokia, aQuantive and Online Services) come to just over $25bn by my calc. That's over a billion short of Linked In and still doesn't include the monumental near miss that was the $35bn odd Ballmer offered for Yahoo! (pre ! tilt) but Jerry Yang turned down. I'd speculate Ballmer thinks he had a lucky escape but he probably thinks it's still a compelling purchase (post ! tilt).
Well, to be fair the article did mention that ... "Microsoft’s investments haven’t always paid off."
Actually, can anyone here think of one that did? I'm struggling to think of anything that MS have ever bought that wasn't just money down the drain. I'm sure that there were some products that they bought and re-badged which have earned nicely in the years since. (I think SQL Server was originally bought in and I think it makes money for MS these days, so I'll allow something like that.) However, these are all surely ancient history by now and several orders of magnitude smaller than the cash-spunks we've seen since billg stepped down (and MS lost its way).
With their biggest and fastest growing competitor now in control of the world's largest and most up to date professional CRM platform, Salesfarce will face even more of a uphill struggle to justify the relevance and cost of their proprietary data silo. I recall SFDC attempted on numerous occasions to secure a close partnership with LinkedIn, only to be rebuffed every time.
Better still .. don't delete it, instead change ALL your details to something weird to help poison their well.
And change your email address to a specially created yahoo or hotmail one of course. It won't stop linkedin spam to your original signup address but you can redirect that to /dev/null
Strange to see an amlost universal, non-tech response from you lot on this one.
SatNav (HIYO!) has basically said "Hey, we use MS products to INTERROGATE THE DETAILS OF YOUR WORK AND EMPLOYER'S IP" and you're just all talking catty shit about the end of a tedious social media network?
Get it torgether, Commentards.
"This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn 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."
Oh yes, that's the really scary part.
So they're going to data mine the information from your CV, your office software, and your ERP system, and use the result to sell you stuff? I'm not sure I would be looking forward to that.
Leaving the creepy data mining aside though, this sort of acquisition is probably the future direction of Microsoft. Their older products such as Windows are becoming legacy platforms which will fade away as they are undercut by open source commodities.
However, that's a lot of money to pay for a company that Reuters reported was losing money (net loss), not hitting growth targets, and having a tough time outside of the American market. If it was for a fraction of the price, it might make more sense. However, the new tech bubble has inflated the cost of anything "cloud". Microsoft might have been better off keeping their money in the bank and picking up companies cheap after the next tech market collapse. That's what the big oil companies are doing now in the oil industry.
I must admit that after reading the various Sat Nad quotes I too got the impression that they are just buying a resource they can use to data mine to target sales activities. Seems a bit on the expensive side.
I'm going to update my CV to include Age of Empires. It might just be the trigger Microsoft's automated data mining needs to reboot the series.
"I can't even remember how many times I created throw away accounts because I wanted to look at someone."
Conversely, there are certainly people out there whose "links" have been accumulated purely because their real job is the sort of public-facing activity where it is helpful to have a significant presence in social media. It's not *used* for anything. It's just something that people in certain professions need (apparently) to have these days.
Like all social media, the data in LinkedIn is worth what the people who contributed it have spent gathering it.
Um, Henry Kissinger did win the Peace Prize. Or rather, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were jointly offered the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Paris Peace Accords which prompted the withdrawal of American forces from the Vietnam war. Kissinger accepted. Le Duc Tho declined to accept the award because the war had not ended. ("Peace? What peace?")
In 1976, I kid you not, Kissinger became the first honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters - if we're doing 'absurd', that's a better example.
Anyway: Henry Kissinger, how I'm missing 'yer...
Instagrams to Olympic-size swimming pools of $1 bills
According to a random user comment* I found on the interwebs, it takes 2,213,956,784 dollar bills to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool ($OSSP). If we take that as fact**, the MS-LinkedIn acquisition was worth 11.839 $OSSP.
11.839 $OSSP = 36 Instagrams. Therefore:
1 Instagram = 3.04 $OSSP
1 $OSSP = 0.329 Instagrams
* https://www.quora.com/How-many-1-unstacked-bills-would-it-take-to-fill-up-an-Olympic-sized-swimming-pool (scroll down to answer #2 by Anonymous)
** As we all know, if it were not true, then 'they' wouldn't be allowed to post it online.
I have a semi-dead account over there. I wondered whether to upgrade it when I find time. But this news made my decision. I'll delete it as soon as I the replacement password gets through greylisting (the account is so old they did not even allow me to log in but just sent out a new password).
I did that. First I changed all my data except email (not possible in this case). Then I used advice from this page:
http://thelinkedinman.com/how-to-close-and-delete-your-linkedin-account/
As the reason I gave Other, namely "I do not want an account in a Microsoft company".
Good Bye LinkedIn!!!
Brilliant, that's a lot of money paid for data that is 80% bullshit.
After looking at my co-workers profiles a while ago I was shocked at the level of BS, overexaggeration and outright lies that was up there.
At that point I removed everything from my profile excpt words to the effect of 'as the only honest man left in a room full of liars, i refuse to play this game'
and I *still* get link requests. go figure.
http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-blob-lyrics-burt-bacharach.html
"Beware of the blob, it creeps
And leaps and glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of the blob"
(ending theme from 'The Blob', from the early 1960's)
Yes. Microsoft is now "The Blob". They were "The Borg". Now they're just "The Blob".
Depends on how you judge it. If you THINK ms bought Nokia's business for phones, then you would be right.
However, MS today revealed their real reason for purchasing Nokia. It was their customisation know-how...
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2016/06/13/you-can-now-design-your-own-custom-xbox-one-controller.aspx
Balmer was a nutter. SatNad is trying to out nutter the nutter.
Microsoft seem to be going through an identity crisis. They don't know what they want to be so they are trying to be everything and poorly. If Google built a proper linux distro built for businesses they could do some serious damage to them.
"And in turn, new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising."
So their "business" model will be to spam you to death with targeted ads, at a time when more and more people than ever are installing ad-blockers. Wonderful timing, SatNad. This is going to be another Nokia.