Microsoft Officially Closes Its $26.2B Acquisition of LinkedIn (techcrunch.com) 53
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.
And Salesforce throws a tantrum (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure that I am super pleased about the MS takeover but I am certainly glad it wasn't Salesforce...
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What I am not pleased about is consolidation. LinkedIn was doing just fine.
At least with MS it will be integrated into O365 and be useful for those in that ecosystem.
Nothing different than what Salesforce would probably do, but I think that the O365 ecosystem is way more accessible and widespread than the Salesforce ecosystem.
I have a feeling that if SF got LI, it would disappear into their CRM silo, never to be seen from again.
I actually like LI and I certainly like Lynda.com and I would hate for SF to mak
Time to Delete Linked In account (Score:3)
Probably should have done it sooner.
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Linked gets the 3 E's (Score:2)
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I am half convinced that the three Es aren't intentional, but rather the result of really bad management decisions.
Any significant level of incompetence, is indistinguishable from malice. (apologies to Arthur C Clarke)
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I am half convinced that the three Es aren't intentional, but rather the result of really bad management decisions.
Maybe the first two Es are intentional, and the 3rd one is accidental......
Actually, LinkedIn got the One Y (Score:2)
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.
Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: Maybe (Score:1)
And purely co-incidentaly... (Score:2)
... 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.
Fantastic! (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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In a lot of industries, retired people are brought back for niche knowledge, and get double the rate they made as an employee.
Let's do some quick math, shall we?
2x former salary rate/hour - 90% former hours - medical/dental benefits + Obamacare = less than what you made before.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up corporate abuse.
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In a lot of industries, retired people are brought back for niche knowledge, and get double the rate they made as an employee.
Let's do some quick math, shall we?
2x former salary rate/hour - 90% former hours - medical/dental benefits + Obamacare = less than what you made before.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up corporate abuse.
You're being disingenuous here. The reality is that retirees don't want a 40-60 hour work week--they're fucking retired. They don't mind (in fact, many really enjoy) getting paid a multiple of their former hourly rate to consult on projects for a few hours a week or month. If you work in the right industry / for the right company, it's even part of your retirement planning (that you'll have x additional income due to the 500 hours a year you plan to invoice your previous employer / their customers).
Peopl
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In a lot of industries, retired people are brought back for niche knowledge, and get double the rate they made as an employee.
Let's do some quick math, shall we?
2x former salary rate/hour - 90% former hours - medical/dental benefits + Obamacare = less than what you made before.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up corporate abuse.
You're being disingenuous here. The reality is that retirees don't want a 40-60 hour work week--they're fucking retired. They don't mind (in fact, many really enjoy) getting paid a multiple of their former hourly rate to consult on projects for a few hours a week or month. If you work in the right industry / for the right company, it's even part of your retirement planning (that you'll have x additional income due to the 500 hours a year you plan to invoice your previous employer / their customers).
People in this role aren't burger flippers. They're people with valuable domain knowledge that hasn't been picked up by their replacement. Generally speaking, i's win-win for everyone except people like you that are bitching about the man keeping them down.
H1-B Visa abuses have pushed plenty of qualified workers out to the retirement pasture prematurely, so while that whole concept of being called upon for a few hours a week sounds like a nice cushy stream of "extra" income, the reality of my mathematical model stands out like a chapped ass.
And the only ones feeling the "win-win" in that situation are the corporations paying Visa workers slave wages, as they keep an eye on the first signs of grey hair coming from the rest of the workforce to abuse in a right-
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I'll grant you premature retirement is not a good thing (though it can be, if the buyout is attractive enough) and changes the equation. That said, I stand behind my point. If the knowledge in your head doesn't exist elsewhere, you can make decent extra income in retirement. If you were FORCED out of that job by a stupid company despite having irreplaceable knowledge, you can charge them an asshole tax.
One of our technical sales guys is retiring next year. He already has multiple contracts lined up for
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> The reality is that retirees don't want a 40-60 hour work week--they're fucking retired.
The reality, unfortunately, is that many retirees don't want to retire. They're offered early retirement, or forced into retirement, in order to save money on senior employee salaries, or to eliminate an employee who disagrees with new corporate policy. I've several peers of my age who've faced just this in both public and private organizations.
Meh, when you got that much money (Score:2)
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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.
I only bother with Linked In when I'm looking for work. For my career (tehcnology) it hasn't got any more use than something an employer or recruiter checks before calling you. So you make sure it's clean and presentable.
However for less... shall we say... practical careers like sales, marketing and HR they apparently use it quite a lot.
I feel microsoft has made another blunder.
Microsoft isn't exactly hurting. They've got money to burn and this is probably going to end up costing them less than their Games and Entertainment division that they'r
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Education contracts and HoloLens
This is great news... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is great news... ... I always hated LinkedIn, now I know it'll be gone in 5 years.
Impossible? Piffle. (Score:3)
Interesting data mining opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Wow! Three MS stories in a row! (Score:1)
useless site (Score:3, Insightful)
This is what Microsoft is going to do to LinkedIn (Score:2)
Engine block shredder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Twenty mentions of Microsoft on the front page (Score:1)