More connections to enterprise, potential for some cloud HR play, a ready-established pseudo social network to compete with Facebook for Work (maybe as part of a Yammer, Office365, Skype for Business play), st-tonne of user data, SlideShare...

This article explains it pretty well: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-microsoft-just-bought-linkedin-its-all-about-the-data&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdnet.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-microsoft-just-bought-linke...</a>

Does anyone have a reference to even some wild speculation as to what Microsoft gets out of for their own business?  Or is this just somewhere to park some cash?  I am honestly confused.

Is Microsoft becoming the official &quot;bad bank&quot; for tech investments?

I&#x27;ve always assumed that was part of the embrace-extend-extinguish - &quot;look at this shitty OS, Skype doesn&#x27;t even work on there; you should use Win X&quot;.

At least it does work. Which of course Skype for Business completely doesn&#x27;t, even in browsers (on Linux). Even then buying a Skype for Business account on Windows it&#x27;s the most confusing mess as they assume that you&#x27;re buying the full Office 365 suite and want to take over your email sending. Which contains this massive admin section that&#x27;s basically empty and doesn&#x27;t make much sense. So then you end up with some terrible user@blah.microsoftonline.com account which unless you pay for more than the basic package isn&#x27;t an email address at all. So people still have to manually send you the link for any meeting that you are a part of. Then you have to do a real hunt to find the download for Skype for Business - cause they all assume you just bought the whole Office 365.I also can&#x27;t connect to any Skype for Business account via Skype on Linux - just for messaging. That does work for some people for my Skype account on Windows to connect to Skype for Business but half the people don&#x27;t get my contact requests or they are never shown online.Of course then there&#x27;s Slack. Slack works everywhere. On top of that Slack (non-video) calls work almost everywhere except for the Firefox and Desktop apps on Linux.

Fortune 500 companies are replacing their entire physical phone systems with Skype.

&gt; Linux support has been deplorable ever since.That is probably a feature, not a bug ;-)

The whole thing has been deplorable since they un-P2P&#x27;d it. Terribly performance and call quality.

Skype is one of the more regrettable acquisitions. Linux support has been deplorable ever since.

I think this one makes sense though. I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s worth the money, but it complements their business approach.

It&#x27;s consistently the top selling game they have over there, it&#x27;s continuing to print money at a constant rate (compared to most games which tend to make most of their money around releases).

Merchandising is huge, I imagine its doing very well in that regard.

Skype, Nokia, Minecraft, LinkedIn. Also Yahoo, almost, at one point.Best of luck to Microsoft with its latest acquisition. It doesn&#x27;t look that sensible though.

&quot;The Microsoft of Social Networking&quot;
Love it.

I would like to second this thought! Even with ad money HOW?!?@?#?  But on the other hand this does feel right, Linkedin does feel like the Microsoft of Social Networking.

What market is exactly that? I still have no idea what Linkedin is all about.Edit: Yes, keep downvoting me, asking questions about LinkedIn clearly doesn&#x27;t add to the discussion. sigh

This just isn&#x27;t true. There&#x27;s nothing about LinkedIn that makes it any more indispensable than those sites or Monster.com or any other site popular with recruiters in the past.This is going to go down in history as one of the most overpriced, worst acquisitions of all time. LinkedIn has already become more associated with being spammy than with any positive connotations.

clearly you know what you&#x27;re talking about...&lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;. One word: ads.

This is the most bizarre thing I&#x27;ve heard. People want Snapchat, Instagram. People have LinkedIn. No one wants it. It&#x27;s a dinosaur. People using it actively just haven&#x27;t realized it&#x27;s dead already.

Unlike Snapchat or Instagram, which could very likely turn into MySpace 2.0 or 3.0, Linkedin is actually very entrenched in its market.

That valuation should be for more like $3B in profit!

Their net income is 0.6% of their valuation.

Revenue isn&#x27;t really relevant when you&#x27;re losing money as fast as Linkedin. They have no real competitors, and they still aren&#x27;t able to turn a profit.Even $3 billion is to much.

That&#x27;s revenue. They made no profit for that year and actually ended up losing money.

Well they did do $3 billion in revenue last year. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;q&#x2F;is?s=LNKD+Income+Statement&amp;annual" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;q&#x2F;is?s=LNKD+Income+Statement&amp;annual</a>

There are far cheaper ways of getting LinkedIn&#x27;s database!

As someone else pointed out, their revenue is pretty decent. But their biggest asset is likely key staff as well as, as social networks go, that it has the cleanest&#x2F;most useful database of users.

Because they already own the &quot;Office&quot;. They want you to integrate your Outlook\Exchange with Linked in.

LinkedIn is doing well man.
Why Microsoft did this is another question.

An existing user base is priceless. In france, when you sell a shop, you also sell for the &quot;fond de commerce&quot;, meaning that an existing list of client is part of the price.You also have to consider that so many companies use linkedin. It&#x27;s an industry standard for professional networking, which has a different meaning than networking with friend (&quot;consumer&quot; networking I guess ?).

I am surprised why people think that amount is outrageous. LinkedIn has so far been pathetic at everything except magically mantaining their monopoly of professional network but I believe it is far more valuable than it is now.I am not sure what has held LinkedIn back these many years but it is certainly possible that the new leadership can push a lot of great changes to the platform.

Holy fuck that is a lot of money. How on earth is LinkedIn worth anywhere near that?!

Here&#x27;s looking forward to my Hotmail account email address being accidentally &#x27;shared&#x27; with LinkedIn and the never-ending LinkedIn spam returning.

Just because one team on Windows 10 made a huge mistake doesn&#x27;t mean the entirety of Microsoft is full of people looking to fill the world with dark patterns. They employ about 50,000 engineers last time I checked...

I&#x27;m not so hopeful. Given that Microsoft pulled out every dark pattern in the book for Windows 10, I can only think things will get worse.

yeah you would! But why would MSFT accept a all cash deal. All they key employees holding the matured options mighy cash out and leave?

So people can cash the fk out, baby! (If I could negotiate $26B in cash, I would.)

I&#x27;m still wondering which company is which in that.

Not sarcasm, I&#x27;m thinking MS purchases the company knowing what its issues (or perceived) are. I see MS as the lesser of 2 evils, a company I can generally trust with my data.The &#x27;Dark Patterns&#x27; that LNKD employs would hurt the rest of MS, so this less unethical behaviour would be as that result.Also helps that LNKD will be consolidated with MS in future, so maybe less pressure on the bottom-line as they&#x27;ll be a part of the MS group instead of shareholders expecting certain EPS from them.

&gt; I hope this will usher in an era of less unethical behaviour from the company under new leadership.&#x2F;s ?

Borrowed it cheap, makes for a fast close. Maybe looking to pad the MS revenue numbers later in the year due to less growth in cloud infrastructure. (Straight out of IBM playbook.)

I hope this will usher in an era of less unethical behaviour from the company under new leadership. Congratulations to shareholders.Anyone know why they&#x27;d negotiate an all cash settlement?

No I&#x27;m talking about the user interface and user experience.

&quot;Loading... The website doesn&#x27;t respond. Do you want to restart?&quot;

Yeah, if they roll out the Azure theme I would be incredibly happy!

I hope they do a rewrite&#x2F;redesign of the frontend.

It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how they integrate LinkedIn with Yammer (if they do at all). Particularly with the launch of Facebook at Work recently too.

Skype for business button on LI profiles. More stickiness for o365.Data for Dynamics. People assume CRM here, and I tend to agree, but I wouldn&#x27;t discount the ERP&#x2F;supply-chain management software play. Microsoft seems to be more interested in manufacturing than marketing.Slide share integration for PowerPoint&#x2F;O365. More stickiness.Lynda.com - increasing developer pool for C#&#x2F;Xamarin, which in turn means more stickiness for Visual Studio, Azure, Windows and SQL Server, Dynamics families, SharePoint.Lynda.com - increasing user base for productivity software.Lynda.com - future play for HR training both content and technology.A truckload of content.

What is Microsoft hoping to gain from this?

More like:* Exec B: Ok, I&#x27;ve *Binged a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by price, but really we&#x27;ll need to come up with a strategy first to make a good choice...

&gt; and ordered them by list price,Missing steps: opened Excel, created a new document, pasted them in, did &#x27;Text to columns&#x27;, clicked the &#x27;Price&#x27; column header, went to the &#x27;Data&#x27; tab, clicked &#x27;Sort&#x27;, expanded my selection to include adjancent cells...

&gt; Ok, I&#x27;ve Googled a list of top 10 social networking sitesWell played!

Like the forced Win10 updates, spyware, ads directly in the OS which you paid for, ...?

Have they? Business wise? Or because he likes open source (which is orthogonal and irrelevant to the discussion)?

Before Satya was CEO, it was normal to see a bunch of Nokia Lumia phones in every bus, tram or metro train in Germany. Right now it would be hard to find even one, and Windows Phone seems to be an abandoned project. So I cannot entirely agree that Satya is so much better as a CEO than Ballmer.

Ah, the armchair critic. I&#x27;m by no means a Microsoft fanboy, but things have been much better under Satya Nadella.

Pretty sure so.cl was a demo for some kind of MS tech, rather than an actual destination site.

Speaking of Yammer, Knowledge Architecture has made their own platform on top of Yammer for an internal social network for companies.

Microsoft actually created their own social network: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.so.cl&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.so.cl&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;So.cl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;So.cl</a>And Microsoft bought Yammer - an &quot;enterprise social network for businesses&quot;.

I feel like I keep up with tech stuff pretty good but I had to look up what Dynamics was when Satya mentioned it in his internal email.

&gt;Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.This. This the only reason im excited about the acquisition. LinkedIn UX is awful.What makes me nervous though, is some things could get worse. (skype has gone downhill ever since the acquisition i feel).

Yet, the chances this will go terribly wrong are much higher, just in general with &quot;other social networks&quot;, but also given Microsoft&#x27;s track record with multi-billion dollar acquisitions.

Exactly. Integration of LinkedIn data with Dynamics and Yammer would be huge.Imagine this scenario:- User is logged in to LinkedIn- User visits your website- Their visit is logged by some JS to Dynamics CRM- A record is created&#x2F;updated in Dynamics CRM, populated with their name, job title and contact details from LinkedInFurther down the line, I can see LinkedIn fully becoming part of Office 365.This isn&#x27;t Microsoft&#x27;s attempt to get into the social networking game. This is Microsoft wanting accurate data to augment their enterprise collaboration&#x2F;digital workplace platform.

Calling LinkedIn a business tool seems more appropriate. No one actually thinks of it as a social network anymore do they? (In the consumer sense of the term, not the graph theory one)

&gt; I wouldn&#x27;t personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recomendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn.I&#x27;m a recruiter, and fully understand reluctance to use recruiters (expensive, not to mention a host of other reputation issues).I don&#x27;t quite understand &quot;I would&#x27;t hire someone via...LinkedIn&quot;. &#x27;Hire someone via LinkedIn&#x27; could mean a host of things.The most obvious would be an ad - you might place an ad on LinkedIn, and that could be &#x27;hiring via LinkedIn&#x27;. LinkedIn ads are relatively expensive, so I wouldn&#x27;t fault you for not placing ads there either.But to many, LinkedIn is just a database or catalog of people who you can reach out to (or who can reach out to you).If you saw a LinkedIn profile that you thought would make a good addition to your team, would you not reach out to that person just because you found them on LinkedIn?If someone approached you and said &quot;I saw your profile on LinkedIn and I like what your company is doing, I&#x27;d like to get together and discuss the possibility of working with you&quot;, would you say no?I expect the answers are &quot;no&quot; to both questions, but when we (in recruiting) talk about using LinkedIn for hires, we generally would agree that there are a handful of ways LinkedIn might be useful in the hiring process.

&gt;- There&#x27;s a bunch of interesting opportunities for intrgating Dynamics, Yammer, and other MS tools with LinkedIn.I doubt there are any &quot;get $26 billion dollars back&quot; opportunities...

Except I haven&#x27;t gotten a gig in years from LinkedIn. I use it as an automated resume generator tool; I don&#x27;t give a rats ass who sees my resume on LinkedIn itself.

Put the Yammer product folks on LinkedIn and clean up the LinkedIn web and mobile products.

I thought the same you described. Microsoft executives are not dumb, people talk about their failures, but they take controlled risks and are still strong. What about companies that do not take risks and never fail? The profit of this corporation is still impressive, even delaying to take some steps on industry and failing in some products.

Not just the UX but all aspects of brand and design. LinkedIn is hideous, difficult to use, buggy, and creepy. If MSFT can fix a few of those it&#x27;ll be a win. If not it&#x27;s hard to see the platform living another 5 years.

&gt; Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.Wait, what? Are you saying you want Microsoft to &quot;Metro-ify&quot; LinkedIn? Forget the OS, even, for a minute... Just look at what they did to Skype and Office.Are you saying you LIKE their current UX ideology?

&gt; I wouldn&#x27;t personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedInWhy? I don&#x27;t care how someone got the interview, it&#x27;s the person and their skills and abilities that I am going to assess (also recruiters get lots of work off my head, which is good, especially when our HR dept. isn&#x27;t able to do it)

&gt; I wouldn&#x27;t personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recommendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn.This seems like a pretty arbitrary distinction.

&gt; Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;11920306&#x2F;microsoft-ceo-sat..." rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;11920306&#x2F;microsoft-ceo-sat...</a>) &quot;Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?&quot; - anyone know what that means?He&#x27;s referring to whether usage is going mainstream, shifting from early adopters to the general market[1]. He&#x27;s looking at technology that&#x27;s already big but has the potential to get even bigger.When usage is limited only to early adopters, it&#x27;s not useful to Microsoft since it&#x27;s such a large company. But when general folks are also beginning to adopt a piece of technology, it&#x27;s a sign that things are going right.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diffusion_of_innovations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diffusion_of_innovations</a>

&gt; Edit: Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;11920306&#x2F;microsoft-ceo-sat..." rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;11920306&#x2F;microsoft-ceo-sat...</a>) &quot;Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?&quot; - anyone know what that means?In general English, &quot;secular&quot; means &quot;non-religious.&quot;In MBA-speak, &quot;secular&quot; means &quot;non-cyclical.&quot;An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn&#x27;t keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won&#x27;t feel it until advertising stops moving online.)Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.

I presume &quot;secular usage and technology trends&quot; means &quot;is its growth down to the fact it happens to be down to the market it plays showing strong growth trends even without hype and marketing spend associated with this particular company&quot;. Can only assume the secular trend he&#x27;s thinking of there is growth in &quot;business prospecting tools&quot; which is the potential area for Microsoft to build revenue generating services that also integrate with their CRM and Office, and not the established and plateau-ing LinkedIn userbase, which is simply a potential strategic advantage for Microsoft products in that space.Sure, Microsoft don&#x27;t have a great record with their acquisitions, but the opportunity for them to generate more revenue directly and indirectly from this is huge.

Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.Along those lines, maybe they&#x27;ll fix the very broken email alerts for group postings. For quite a while, my experience has been that if I have it set to weekly digests I do get them weekly as expected, but if I set a group to daily digests I get nothing at all. So I get nothing at all for the groups that I have the most interest in. I opened a support ticket about it but got nowhere with it. I don&#x27;t know if this impacts everyone or just some subset of users, but I&#x27;ve seen others complain about it.

I think it also has to do with their view on business communication. (lync or whatever they work on now, you catch my drift)
With linkedin they can integrate that into their system and have a(nother?) unique selling point.

&quot;Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.&quot;You buy the shades, and I&#x27;ll get ready to search the registry for a lower case hack.

&quot;Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn&quot;Why do you think that will happen? Azure had AWS as a model, yet the UX is not just worse but surprisingly worse. MS bought a product I was on, and I was excited to clean it up. The exact opposite happened; we were given no time to fix design problems, and instead had to pile on features. The MSDN site has been tired for almost two decades now. I feel as though we were talking about two different companies.

&gt;&gt; Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedInMS&#x27;s UX - Like the one where they consider closing a dialog box to be a consent to upgrade to Windows 10? ;)

I imagine it was more like:- Microsoft has the money- LinkedIn is the biggest thing in recruiting (I don&#x27;t especially like it either, but it is). I wouldn&#x27;t personally hire someone via recruiters or LinkedIn, but I would hire someone via a recomendation from a contact I maintain on LinkedIn.- Microsoft makes business tools- There&#x27;s a bunch of interesting opportunities for intrgating Dynamics, Yammer, and other MS tools with LinkedIn.Actually looking forward to MS&#x27;s UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn.Edit: Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;11920306&#x2F;microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-linkedin-memo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;6&#x2F;13&#x2F;11920306&#x2F;microsoft-ceo-sat...</a>) &quot;Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?&quot; - anyone know what that means?

They&#x27;re also likely going to try and move LinkedIn to Azure, which they&#x27;ll use as documentation on how to move large shops to Azure, using it as their Netflix.

Satya&#x27;s steps in the last two years have been very well thought out, so I don&#x27;t think it happened like this. They seem to be betting on cloud first and foremost, and on businesses (vs. personal computing) after that. LinkedIn is really in the same set of products as O365 (in my head, at least).

speaking of, how does LinkedIn make its money anyways?

The outer edges of Twitter&#x27;s user base will frighten off most corporate acquirers. Too much ISIS; too much political screaming; and a user culture that doesn&#x27;t want Facebook style barriers to R-rated or X-rated content.Big companies hate to be caught in the middle of controversies. LinkedIn&#x27;s content is safe to a fault. Buying Twitter and making it uncontroversial would drain two-thirds of the value right away. Maybe more.

is really close to profitThis is the thing I find hard to understand about these big corporate acquisitions. What multiple of &quot;really close to profit&quot; makes a bigger number than $26B?If it&#x27;s a start-up with obvious potential but relatively early in its life, or an established business that is currently reinvesting revenues on a large scale to drive growth, I can understand not being concerned about the profits.But this is LinkedIn. It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s a new company. It&#x27;s already dominant in its market, and I don&#x27;t see obvious potential for spectacular growth within the same area. If it&#x27;s not already making big profits, what makes it worth $26B to Microsoft?

Twitter is the cheapest of the big networks. LinkedIn is entrenched in its market, unlike most of the others (including Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) Twitter I think would be a good buy somewhere, but Jack and his team seem inept and they probably want a massive premium.When I first heard the news it made no sense; but after pondering, I think I know what they are trying to do, and it does makes sense. Also, LinkedIn was relatively cheap compared to its counterparts, I&#x27;ve already seen some shareholders raising some ire because they were trading a LOT higher not long ago.Microsoft doesn&#x27;t have a good track record with big acquisitions, but this is Satya&#x27;s first and we have seen other deals turned down by him for being too rich. Salesforce being the prime example.They paid with all cash (which was yielding nothing,) so now they get the benefit of a company that has pretty good revenues, is really close to profit, and they get a massive tax write off. It also integrates well with their core businesses and like I said, it&#x27;s fairly cheap.Let&#x27;s not forget Satya has had some smart aquisitions lately. Minecraft &amp; Xamarin. So, maybe it&#x27;s worth having confidence in this one.

Week&#x27;s top jobless people will now feature on the Windows blue screen.

You mean they bought Yammer. Yelp is still independent and publicly traded.

Eum... What social network is really making money outside of ads and lots of it?Yes, LinkedIn and it&#x27;s also the most &quot;business minded&quot; social network. So it seems an obvious (good) choice ( don&#x27;t forget, MS also bought Yelp - which was also considered a &#x27;business social network&#x27;)There isn&#x27;t any social network that has this much paying users.

&gt; It prompts me every now and again to congratulate people on job anniversaries--maybe people do that but it&#x27;s a weak play when a company reaches to those depths.So what? Facebook prompts me to congratulate on people&#x27;s birthdays, and Facebook is doing quite well.

&gt; To be honest, they&#x27;re probably buying the users, not the productCouldn&#x27;t agree more.LinkedIn has to be one of the most under-powered network out there. It&#x27;s UX is still reminiscent of Orkut days. It&#x27;s notifications and messaging system is the worst of breed. The network updates and posts on the &quot;wall&quot; are so bad that I stopped reading them years ago because it feels like spam. It prompts me every now and again to congratulate people on job anniversaries--maybe people do that but it&#x27;s a weak play when a company reaches to those depths.Looking forward to Microsoft cleaning this up but I haven&#x27;t seen anything from Microsoft as of late that would inspire confidence on the web. I was at MSN circa 2004 and it has always had an inferiority complex compared to the rest of the industry.LinkedIn won&#x27;t bring much engineering talent to the table either. So revamping it will be a true test of Microsoft&#x27;s resurgence into the web following a string of bad executions.

to be fair some get junked in to azure because of bizspark as well.

You are so right and yet downvoted of course. I think this goes to show the way Microsoft runs its business. Keep the world 10 years behind because people are gullible enough to keep using it. They would have been better off spending the money to buy Canonical.

I don&#x27;t think Nadella understands either enterprise or consumer tech. The Windows 10 forced upgrades, privacy concerns, the milquetoast Surface sales, and the non-stop march of users shifting from Windows to OSX and mobile is a sign that he has no idea what he&#x27;s doing.I suspect MS is destined to enter a Yahoo-like phase of remaining semi-relevant via acquisitions and legacy products enterprise finds difficult to move off of. Skype, Linkedin, Minecraft, etc make little sense for MS to own especially at the incredible prices they paid for them. There&#x27;s no practical ROI here for any of this. Lets call a spade a spade here: MS is just buying customers at this point.The only rational move MS is doing is a me-too copy of AWS. And only because running Windows of AWS was unsupported for a long time and a PITA. People don&#x27;t use Azure but because they like it, its because its the one that run Windows.Nadella isn&#x27;t the Steve Jobs of MS. He&#x27;s, at best, the Melissa Mayer of MS. He&#x27;ll stick around for a while, cash out, and leave a worse running company in his wake. Sadly, when investors demanded Xbox and other divisions be spun off, Nadella fought them tooth and nail. I suspect the investors were right and these divisions would have been more competitive without being tied down to the MS mothership and its questionable leadership and unbelievable spending.MS has money for these buyouts, but where&#x27;s its PSVR&#x2F;Vive competitor? Why are bing results still terrible? Why is Win10 still unliked? Why isn&#x27;t MS taking ransomware seriously? Why is its licensing still overly expensive and impossible to figure out?I wish Nadella was more focused on fixing what&#x27;s broken with MS instead of just buying customers, many of whom will end up leaving anyway when a new competitor comes around. There&#x27;s no loyalty to Linkedin. In fact, professionals just see its as another nuisance in their lives if they want to maintain competitive in the job market.

Actually, I suspect a lot of honest thought and debate went into spending $20 billion, but who knows.

Not all users are equal, I&#x27;d argue a LinkedIn user is worth more than a WhatsApp user

$26.2bn &#x2F; 400mio user = $65 per userFacebook paid $30 to acquire WhatsApp. (And afaik similar what Murdoch paid for MySpace.)

&quot;To be honest, they&#x27;re probably buying the users, not the product.&quot;I thought the same when they invested in &quot;Facebook&quot; and gave some kid with a website 17M or so.And then when they overpaid for Skype.I would not say &quot;probably&quot; any more. They are buying users. 
Maybe it&#x27;s the only way they can stay in the game.

But, they could buy the users for a fraction of the price from any number of shady vendors.

I really don&#x27;t understand why business people use so many buzzwords. Do they really think we&#x27;re all like, &quot;Yeah, man! Cool!&quot;?  Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows sentences filled with business buzzwords are meaningless bull poop.

Satya &amp; Weiner (there&#x27;s your sitcom title) were just on Bloomberg and explained the acquisition. I&#x27;m not exaggerating when I said I really could not understand what they were saying. It felt like they were just saying buzzwords without any verbs in between.I feel like I am in a strange wonderland.

The enterprise world loves LinkedIn. Guess who makes a poop ton of money catering to the enterprise?

Well, they gave a good college try at interfacing with existing social networks. When Windows Phone 7 launched, the MS web&#x2F;mobile infrastructure had fantastic interoperation with FB and Twitter - FB messenger was even their official supporty IM (kind of a snub to MSN Messenger or whatever it&#x27;s called isn&#x27;t it?) Then they bought skype and APIs shifted and things fell apart, but for a while it was really neat.I&#x27;m not surprised to see MS say &quot;screw it&quot; and just buy their own.

Oh, I can just imagine how the process went at MS:* Exec A: Social things are Good (coming to the conclusion about 10 years too late)* Exec B: Shall we create our own Google+?* Exec C: No, that didn&#x27;t turn out that well for Google. Let&#x27;s buy something existing.* Exec B: Ok, I&#x27;ve Googled a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by list price, but really we&#x27;ll need to come up with a strategy first to make a good choice...* Exec A: Booooring. Let&#x27;s just buy the cheapest one and be done with it. What&#x27;s the worst which could happen? Gimme a bonus.To be honest, they&#x27;re probably buying the users, not the product.

The market opens at 9 and traders are usually up earlier to get ready for the high opening volume..

Because trading opens at 9:30.They probably finished the deal over the weekend.E: And it could well be the case that they had planned to announce it yesterday but chose not to because of the Orlando shootings.

As others have stated, this is about prepping the debt markets. They have to sell the deal to potential bond investors.

As a prior equities trader, these were our year-makers if it happened during trading hours.

It seems that there were unusually large amounts traded on Friday.

To get the news out without disrupting the markets - it&#x27;s fairer to allow people to see news like this while the instrument is not trading.

Why would Microsoft release a major M&amp;A announcement at 8:35 AM EST &#x2F; 5:35 AM PST? It&#x27;s not even the professional workday yet!

It looks like you&#x27;re writing a resume! Would you like to set your LinkedIn status to &quot;Looking for work?&quot;

Except this time Clippy&#x27;s serving ads.And my documents&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;spreadsheets are going to be cross-referenced with Linked-In? Sounds like a mechanism to put me one click away from accidentally sending sensitive info to someone working for a competitor.Nothing about this sounds &quot;delightful&quot; to me. It sounds intrusive and risky.

Coming from a company that uses Yammer if it does get Yammer I am totally out and I mean it this time linkedin!

I think their ability to write-off most of the $26b in a couple years must be a defining feature of the whole transaction. I.e. &quot;Oh well, at least the Fed is paying for half of it!&quot;

They also updated Sharepoint to support Yammer integration and made it part of the default Office365 offering.

It&#x27;s essentially unchanged since they bought it. I think all they really did was put Yammer notifications in Outlook. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if LinkedIn turns out the same way.They had to write off the Nokia deal (over 7 billion I believe), this might be the next one of those.

Do many people use Yammer? The company that I&#x27;m with tried it a few years back and it just wasn&#x27;t useful for us. I wonder if they will end up merging Yammer, or at least some Yammer features, into LinkedIn at some point.

Ouch, I knew it took a big hit after dismal earnings and guidance last time (or two) but thought it had recovered a bit.  Congrats on breaking even then I guess to anyone holding since Feb.

Perhaps congrats on the loss and write down if you bought above $196. Looks like LNKD traded north of $200 for a good portion of the last 2 years.

The calls on LNKD are looking pretty sweet <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;EMdaiMO.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;EMdaiMO.png</a>

Congrats to anyone who was holding LinkedIn stock. Microsoft&#x27;s bid of $196 per share has LNKD up $63 bucks a share or 48% in premarket.Edit: Also a cautionary tale for anyone shorting a stock that fundamentally sucks but could be a buyout target. Use options instead!

At least Microsoft will be able to tout the inability to delete a LinkedIn profile as a feature and not a bug.

The internet is becomming more and more like real world businesses.We&#x27;re going to be left with four or so big companies. Facebook, Google, Microsoft.Yahoo Twitter e.t.c will be swallowed up next.

I bet the wire transfer gets held up for being potentially fraudulent because it&#x27;s so big. I&#x27;d love to be the call centre worker who picks up that call.

196&#x2F;share is roughly what LNKD was trading at before their very bad earnings report in February. FWIW.

That makes $60.5 per user. Compared to other social networks this seems to be within a reasonable range.

Somewhat more info in the press release:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.microsoft.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;microsoft-to-acquire-linkedin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.microsoft.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;13&#x2F;microsoft-to-acquire-li...</a>

It&#x27;s the 196th purchase that they bought at $196 &#x2F; share. Somebody was having a laugh in the Finance department.

Add that one to the list: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft#Acquisitions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...</a>Looking trough the list this is probably the biggest acquisition for Microsoft (in monetary value). All-cash transaction nonetheless.

If you bought into the IPO in May, you&#x27;d have realised a 33% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).[1] (196 &#x2F; 45) ^ (1 &#x2F; numberOfYearsSinceMay2011==5.118) - 1

The share price hasn&#x27;t exactly been rosy recently, so at least the shareholders have something to look forward to.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;markets.ft.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;Markets&#x2F;Tearsheets&#x2F;Summary?s=LNKD:NYQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;markets.ft.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;Markets&#x2F;Tearsheets&#x2F;Summary?s=...</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;linkedin-results-research-idUSKCN0VE1N0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;linkedin-results-research-idU...</a>

For reference, IPO in May 2011 was for $45&#x2F;share, and they closed at $94.25 on the first day for a total market cap of $9bn, according to this [1] source.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;technology&#x2F;linkedin_IPO&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;19&#x2F;technology&#x2F;linkedin_IPO&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve had no experience with Lynda but what&#x27;s underwhelming about PS? It definitely seems to lack of depth in a lot of courses but provides a good overview&#x2F;refresher on things in my experience.

If you know of a better resource for software development training materials, please name it so I can make my employer pay for it.

Well both of those are underwhelming in terms of both content and user experience.

LinkedIn owns Lynda, but Microsoft (MSDN) partnered with Pluralsight, interesting how that will play out.

No, I&#x27;m serious. I&#x27;m not a big MS fan, but they&#x27;ve been doing some good things lately. Hopefully they can make LinkedIn feel less scummy.

Here&#x27;s hoping Microsoft keeps up it&#x27;s recent good guy persona, and starts actively identifying and removing dark patterns from LinkedIn.

If I use Skype acquisition as a guide we can expect advertisements all over the site very soon.

&quot;Sent your resignation letter&quot; seems like the more appropriate action.

* You haven&#x27;t changed jobs in 3 years, sending out 40 applications for you. You are welcome.  - Same team that did Windows 10 autoupdate

This is your enterprise agreement bot: 
We&#x27;ve noticed that 83% of your IT department has employment applications out with other enterprise customers. Here is the list of names and what they are looking for in future employment.

While the downvotes are cute, why punish giving credit where credit is due?  I thought their quote was very clever, and worthy of drawing attention to.  Just saying.

WOW, well-played, sir, very well played indeed.  I may have to steal your snark.

&quot;Your career doesn&#x27;t seem to respond anymore. Do you want to restart it now?&quot;

They still could. They do have a bit of cash.

They&#x27;re already doing the Ubuntu on Windows thing with Canonical, no need to buy them yet. Wait at least for the Extend phase.

Buying Canonical would be very unwise. I&#x27;m pretty sure user rates would drop like hell on the day of the announcement. I know I would change my distro.

Probably. On the other hand, Redhat kind of pulled up the drawbridge and focused on parts of the market that don&#x27;t care so much with the RHEL &#x2F; Fedora change. Of the major Linux distributions, I think Redhat is the one whose userbase would be least likely to be upset.A few years back it&#x27;d have been totally unthinkable, but today, given that MSFT has surprised repeatedly with a more friendly approach towards the open source community, and given that Redhat - while still contributing a lot - has pulled back in a sense, it would be less problematic.Wouldn&#x27;t be trivial to pull off, by any means, though. I think if MS would like to pick up a major Linux vendor, they&#x27;d better spend a year and lots of money buttering up the community with more open source releases and PR first.

So, just a typical day for Microsoft for the past ~20 years?

That would attract truly unprecedented levels of hostility and a declaration of war by segments of the Linux community.

I think, they just haven&#x27;t bought those yet, because they could get a monopolization lawsuit for that. Red Hat and Canonical are among their biggest competitors in the OS market, as small as they are.

I&#x27;m not sure what Microsoft is getting with LinkedIn for $26bn.I know it is a little crazy, but I think they would have been better off buying Redhat for $15bn or Canonical (Ubuntu linux) for even cheaper.

True - I can see them using this purchase to sell more cloud services by mining the data for connections.

Imagine you&#x27;re one of the biggest companies in the world.On from that imagine you could afford to buy one of the most comprehensive CRMs in the world and all the lovely data it holds. In addition to the fringe benefits, if Microsoft use this purchase intelligently they&#x27;ll reap serious rewards from it.(I fucking hate Linked In, but I think it&#x27;s a legit purchase for Microsoft)

Oh wow. This purchase does not make any sense. What benefit does LinkedIn bring to Microsoft?Wouldn&#x27;t surprise me another competitor will emerge and replace LinkedIn. It&#x27;s time anyway with their annoying spamming of late.

Microsoft employs fifty thousand engineers. A group of them fucked up with that Windows 10 debacle. I reckon on the whole Microsoft very much do care about their reputation.

Unsure if you&#x27;re being serious... don&#x27;t need to look much further than Windows 10 auto update to see how much Microsoft care...

Perhaps LinkedIn will use fewer evil antipatterns now that its ownership has something resembling a reputation to uphold.

It won&#x27;t be fixed. If anything it will be worse...

And either way, as an MS and LI user, I want MS to meddle. I want them to fix the dumpster-fire that is LinkedIn. Nobody likes LinkedIn except recruiters.

&quot; Will continue to operate independently &quot;.Why do they even say that. Microsoft didn&#x27;t pay 20billion for a passive investment.Such a silly thing to say.

I am actually surprised there are no anti-trust kind of law that are kicking in. I guess this is just a case no one thought that would be an issue at some point (or is it really?).

Right, but 26 Billion! Something doesn&#x27;t add up.

Straight from the privacy policy: &quot;If there is a change in control or sale of all or part of LinkedIn, we may share your information with a third party, who will have the right to use that information in line with this Privacy Policy.&quot; So not Microsoft specifically but they did agree LinkedIn could transfer their data to any buyer.

What I never get with these huge acquisitions is what about the user&#x27;s privacy?They never agreed with Microsoft to have their data but somehow ms automatically gets access to it?

A huge database which can be utilized for sales. Who to talk to with what profile, which kind of approach is likely to work, and so forth. A great opportunity for some data mining folks!

Windows 10 LinkedIn EditionUpdate your LinkedIn profile with shell context menus!

Between Windows constantly pestering and even trying to trick me to upgrade to Windows 10 and getting LinkedIn requests from people I&#x27;ve only ever met once this is truly a match made in hell.

LinkedIn closed public trading on Friday at ~131 per share. This deal represents a $196 per share price - so anyone that purchased on Friday is looking at ~50% ROI.Is this the best non-Facebook ROI for a social network that&#x27;s been available to the public markets?

Naah, they&#x27;ll just make him a default, like Tom on MySpace.

&quot;Bill Gates is awaiting your reply.&quot;

2 people want to add you to their professional network on LinkedIn.
Abort, Retry, Fail?

Won&#x27;t work. Instead LinkedIn will now infect the OS team, and before you know it you&#x27;ll get LinkedIn notifications during boot.

You have this wrong.
This is how microsoft plans on spamming the remainder of people to upgrade to windows 10

Satya Nadella has made a bold final attempt to stop LinkedIn from spamming him

Will they also rewrite it from Node to .NET core?

That&#x27;s a very safe and sure bet. Why it would go any other way would be really puzzling.

just my own prediction.. msft will attempt to replatform the entire stack onto Azure, making heavy use of their Azure platform services as a way to show how scalable they are (sort of the same play they made with hotmail decades ago).

&gt; Yahoo were borderline negligent with that purchaseThat&#x27;s not what most HNers were saying at that time, they were praising Mayer and her &quot;awesome strategy&quot; of shopping her way into success. Of course it didn&#x27;t make sense at all, like that deal makes very little sense at all too.

Yahoo were borderline negligent with that purchase. I suspect the shareholders and board at Microsoft have a much better idea of what they&#x27;re planning to do to monetise Linked In.

The last gasp. Just like Yahoo with tumblr. When a corporate behemoth has a dream of transformation, they rather just buy that dream than to actually undergo transformation themselves.

If clippy makes a return, I for one back this move.

Does this mean clippy is going to start offering me jobs?

I was already very upset with the direction Windows 10 was taking in term of privacy. Now Microsoft wants to be big in social network. I hate to say that but it is really time to ditch Windows.

Another account which will be forcibly connected with ms credentials. Opportunity to collect another sensitive information in an effort to create &quot;better UX&quot;.

Sounds like Microsoft is going the Yahoo route.

You better hurry before Microsoft removes that &quot;feature&quot;.

I deleted mine two years back but am trying to get a job at MSFT around august, so I suppose I should now make one, huh?

Wonder how many people will use this as an opportunity to either create a linkedin profile or to delete the one they already have. Change-of-control risks on a deal like this are substantial.This is also an excellent reminder that you never know where the profiles you create will end up.

I&#x27;m genuinely curious as to what makes LinkedIn worth that much. On the surface it just looks like Microsoft is trying to commit suicide.As as aside, how many startups in Silicon Valley are rushing to up their spam game in the wake of this? :)

One can only assume that they want to dig their heels into entreprise. LinkedIn is massive when it comes to professional connections &amp; Hiring, even company PR. LinkedIn has a bunch of products that can connect well into MS’s ecosystems and add value there.

They probably got Slideshare (meh) and Lynda (very good) in the package.Disclaimer: I work at one of Lynda&#x27;s competitors.

Genuine question... what do MS stand to gain from this?

Prediction:
LinkedIn will integrate with office 365, and you will be forced into a LinkedIn for Business account when you use Office 365. You can choose to make your information public, private or a combination of both (hopefully).This will be marketed as a single place to keep up-to-date resumes, towards both job seekers and corporate HR people who want better insight into their own workforce.

The only explanation I can come up with is an aquihire of dark ui-pattern experts from LinkdIn to better trick users into installing Windows 10.

Actually there hasn&#x27;t been enough talk about the companies LinkedIn acquired.Connectifier - recruiting intelligenceLynda - online learningFlipTop - predictive marketingRunHop - personalised contentRefresh.io - relationship content surfacingThese could be huge additions to Azure, Office 365, Bing, Cortana etc.

I agree, plus Slideshare can be a massive boost to Powerpoint.

I&#x27;m surprised by the amount of negativity about the deal here on HN. It seems like an excellent match. I could see LinkedIn as an asset for Microsoft anywhere in the realms of work collaboration and HR. No other social network besides LinkedIn comes close to complimenting MicroSoft&#x27;s wheelhouse of enterprise utility.

Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26B