Yeah, its spammy, but spam from a single source is pretty easy to manage. As a consultant and writer it would be much more difficult to do my job without the ubiquitous ability to contact people at other companies easily.

I'm not saying its the best, but when the alternative is nothing at all, I can't really fault it for doing what it needs to to make money.

Also of note, a 25% reduction in sales and marketing expense would have made it profitable this last quarter, so evidently there are plenty of ways it is adding value to others.

I love the common assumption that you can just stop all sales and marketing activity and nothing will happen. LinkedIn makes its money from selling $80k enterprise contracts for Premium. They don't write themselves.

I take it you don't work in enterprise ? It's terribly popular and I would imagine if you're over 40 then you may well be spending more time on it than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat combined.

Given Microsoft is trying to double down on the corporate space it is a pretty smart buy. Being about to push Azure/Office 365 through it could be invaluable.

I'm not currently in enterprise but I've worked at Ford and U of Mich. before so I have experience in that space. Thing do tend to get entrenched in enterprise space more so than in smaller businesses, but even still LinkedIn doesn't have any tentacles that make it irreplaceable. When the next thing comes along, enterprise users will be slower to switch off LinkedIn, but they will do so.

If Microsoft had paid a lot less I could maybe see this purchase being more logical, but at $26 billion I just cannot agree this is a smart buy on any level.

Being spammy -and- having its user database liberated at frequent intervals.

Well, regular users don't mind the spam as much and might not even know or realize the true impact of those account leaks.

Plus Microsoft is quite likely to take care of both problems. At least on the security front, since 2005 or so, I haven't heard of any leaks on their part.

This can only be my impression, however, given the amount of "LinkedIn trainers" people and given the amount of people that are willing to pay a LinkedIn trainer to enhance their profiles, I would not be that sure that there's nothing indispensable in LinkedIn.