MS could, erm, look up those org charts on linkedin.com for $0 (indeed very useful at times.) What value is added by buying LinkedIn for $26G? How owning LinkedIn is going to add $1-1.5B/year (assuming eventually you want a P/E between, I dunno, 15 and 25), to MS's revenue?

(I'm sure someone at MS has an answer to this, it's just that they haven't been tremendously successful in the past with their big acquisitions; I don't think Skype or Nokia paid off. And in general tech companies often buy other companies without much apparent success. Why is it so crazy to doubt their wisdom in any particular instance?)

Reminds me of the joke - MS Executive buys Skype for $8bn - didn't anyone tell him you can download it for free?

> What value is added by buying LinkedIn for $26G?

1. Integrate Skype into LinkedIn 2. Add a shared chat screen (video group chat)

This will allow many Human Resources to perform interviews more efficiently (in return to subscription). I can imagine many other new attractive features MS could easily add (e.g. syntax highlighting in group chat).

They haven't managed to integrate Skype into anything else, it's a complete shemozzle. Why would they suddenly manage to integrate it into LinkedIn?

Skype is offered in Office365 packages and appears to have replaced Lync

And can get rid of horrible Webex calls.

Webex at least works under linux (unfortunatelly only 32bit firefox).

I maintain a windows vm solely for running webex! I did not know this worked - thanks.

Jit.si

Works in browser, no account, encrypted by default.

New web based WebEx attendance is essentially in beta.

> MS could look up those org charts

That's the best remark in the whole thread. Employee poking at competitors. Sales teams looking up the right people to connect with. Thanks to the LinkedIn share button, like Facebook, they can have parts of your browsing history. I don't even know whether the purchase should be allowed.

Yeah, once integrated, I'd be worried if I was an MS employee using it to scout competitors and talk to recruiters.

This also gives MS some great data to possibly feed into the team that manages their investment portfolio. How valuable would it be to have a (admittedly not perfect) feed of employee growth/deflation for various companies? That would also provide a ton of leverage for future acquisitions, etc.

There's a LOT you can learn from LinkedIn data if you have access to the unfiltered data.

Exactly! And the gold weapon would be able to see all employees' corporate and private emails, along with their search queries. Uh oh.

Wow.

In terms of data mining this is still a huge price-point, but obviously some team at MS projected the benefits vs expense.

MS bought skype just to stop google from buying they. Google made a big for skype and MS swooped in and outbid them. They never had any real plans for skype they just dont want to allow google to gain near monopoly in the consumer VOIP market. Which seems strange for MS to care about since they were not in this sector previously but Ballmer just held such a huge grudge with google and did it out of spite. Really shows what kind of CEO Ballmer was and why MS is so much better off without him

Skype for Business (and it's predecessor Lync) owns corporate voice and collaboration market

Cisco WebEx and Jabber own corporate voice communication (mostly because everyone uses Cisco VoIP phones). Skype is used mostly in the SMB market.

But it didn't back then, and it's only called Skype because MS acquired Skype, not the other way around. At the time of the acquisition, comparing Skype to Office Communicator (as it was called before Lync) was a stretch at best.

Skype for Business is just rebranded Lync. AFAIK there aren't any new features that were integrated across from Skype. Hell, it's still lync.exe.

We just 'upgraded' from Lync to Skype for Business and as far as I can tell it's exactly the same program with slightly different UI chrome.

Unfortunately.

It seems to be one of those deals where the deal-makers (i.e. the finance professionals and lawyers involved in the deal) are doing it for the fees they stand to earn from it. A bunch of nameless faceless people who will never be held responsible for the deal.

They, erm, can't do that. Scraping LinkedIn would violate the terms of service.

It's actually a brilliant synergy. LinkedIn was limited to a revenue model around HR, recruiters, and individuals buying subscriptions to different views of their core service. They weren't in the business of building CRMs, enterprise email solutions, or operating systems. And yet those very systems are the ones where people most natively would want to ask "what is the context and history of the person I'm connecting to?"

Beyond the expansion in potential revenue models, it's rational for Microsoft to spend their cash on things that cement their dominance in the workplace, particularly as Apple and Google could always choose to make a hard push into that space. Assuming LinkedIn continues to dominate as a professional network, Windows 15 Powered By LinkedIn is a hell of a moat to cross.