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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 crea
by ivoras 10y ago
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't turn out that well for Google. Let's buy something existing.
* Exec B: Ok, I've Googled a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by list price, but really we'll need to come up with a strategy first to make a good choice...
* Exec A: Booooring. Let's just buy the cheapest one and be done with it. What's the worst which could happen? Gimme a bonus.
To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product.
- moondowner 10y agoMicrosoft actually created their own social network: http://www.so.cl/ http://www.so.cl/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So.cl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So.cl And Microsoft bought Yammer - an "enterprise social network for businesses".
- mrcwinn 10y agoActually, I suspect a lot of honest thought and debate went into spending $20 billion, but who knows.
- nailer 10y agoI imagine it was more like: - Microsoft has the money - LinkedIn is the biggest thing in recruiting (I don't especially like it either, but it is). I wouldn'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's a bunch of interesting opportunities for intrgating Dynamics, Yammer, and other MS tools with LinkedIn. Actually looking forward to MS's UX folk cleaning up LinkedIn. Edit: Nadella said re: how MS looks at acquisitions (http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11920306/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-linkedin-memo http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/13/11920306/microsoft-ceo-sat...) "Is this asset riding secular usage and technology trends?" - anyone know what that means?
- pc86 10y ago> I wouldn'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.
- whatok 10y agoI 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.
- anentropic 10y agoyeah same, have no idea wtf Microsoft do these days
- krmmalik 10y ago>Actually looking forward to MS'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).
- Bartweiss 10y agoIf we're truly lucky, they'll get their security folks to take a look at LinkedIn as well.
- lucb1e 10y ago> This. This the only reason im excited about the acquisition. LinkedIn UX is awful. Yeah well they acquired Skype and see what a mess that became. Even Windows itself sometimes... I suppose it depends on which team gets the job?
- knodi123 10y ago> I suppose it depends on which team gets the job? I bet! The number of people in here that think a company with >118,000 employees is always going to make the same tech and design decisions is baffling.
- poorman 10y agoMore like: * Exec B: Ok, I've *Binged a list of top 10 social networking sites for sale, and ordered them by price, but really we'll need to come up with a strategy first to make a good choice...
- ralfd 10y agoI think googling was part of the joke
- nashashmi 10y agoI think he meant Bing gives poor search results, which is why they bought LinkedIn instead.
- TheRealDunkirk 10y agoI didn't even catch it. That's how much googling has become a part of the language. It's been Kleenexed.
- ralfd 10y agoBtw: A few years ago Microsoft paid for product placement in television series to counter "google it". It is amazingly awkward and sounds like from a strange parallel universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfHuZ5qrYX4
- 10y ago
- empthought 10y ago> Ok, I've Googled a list of top 10 social networking sites Well played!
- flashman 10y ago> and ordered them by list price, Missing steps: opened Excel, created a new document, pasted them in, did 'Text to columns', clicked the 'Price' column header, went to the 'Data' tab, clicked 'Sort', expanded my selection to include adjancent cells...
- wuliwong 10y agoThey probably used google docs.
- karterk 10y agoAh, the armchair critic. I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboy, but things have been much better under Satya Nadella.
- badlogic 10y agoLike the forced Win10 updates, spyware, ads directly in the OS which you paid for, ...?
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoYou not liking it doesn't make it a poor business strategy.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoBy that standard, Ballmer doubling down on the shitty enterprise software that still makes gobs of money was a good strategy.
- imron 10y agoBut large numbers of people not liking it does make it a poor business strategy - not immediately, but it's the sort of thing people will remember.
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoLarge numbers of people in the tech community. Most people aren't us.
- SpaceManiac 10y agoI would think that non-techies would be even more confused and annoyed by their computer suddenly drastically changing out from underneath them without their permission.
- 10y ago
- sz4kerto 10y agoSatya's steps in the last two years have been very well thought out, so I don'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).
- partiallypro 10y agoTwitter 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've already seen some shareholders raising some ire because they were trading a LOT higher not long ago. Microsoft doesn't have a good track record with big acquisitions, but this is Satya'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's fairly cheap. Let's not forget Satya has had some smart aquisitions lately. Minecraft & Xamarin. So, maybe it's worth having confidence in this one.
- ChrisArchitect 10y agospeaking of, how does LinkedIn make its money anyways?
- surfmike 10y agoMostly subscription fees paid by recruiters for premium access.
- jonathankoren 10y agoAbout half to two-thirds comes from job listings, the remaining is split evenly between subscriptions and ads.
- GCA10 10y agoThe outer edges of Twitter's user base will frighten off most corporate acquirers. Too much ISIS; too much political screaming; and a user culture that doesn't want Facebook style barriers to R-rated or X-rated content. Big companies hate to be caught in the middle of controversies. LinkedIn's content is safe to a fault. Buying Twitter and making it uncontroversial would drain two-thirds of the value right away. Maybe more.
- zzalpha 10y agoWell this is a content free comment... nice snark, though. Edit: My apologies. Judging by the discussion here, I guess we expect high quality comments here at Redd... uhh Hacker News unless it's about Microsoft. My bad. Guess I didn't read that fine print...
- dang 10y agoIt's true that the comment was snarky and unsubstantive. The assumption that other people are idiots tends to degrade discussion quality. Still, please don't respond by making the thread even worse.
- tarunbansal_me 10y agoWeek's top jobless people will now feature on the Windows blue screen.
- NicoJuicy 10y agoEum... What social network is really making money outside of ads and lots of it? Yes, LinkedIn and it's also the most "business minded" social network. So it seems an obvious (good) choice ( don't forget, MS also bought Yelp - which was also considered a 'business social network') There isn't any social network that has this much paying users.
- rrdharan 10y agoYou mean they bought Yammer. Yelp is still independent and publicly traded.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- aleem 10y ago> To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product Couldn't agree more. LinkedIn has to be one of the most under-powered network out there. It's UX is still reminiscent of Orkut days. It's notifications and messaging system is the worst of breed. The network updates and posts on the "wall" 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's a weak play when a company reaches to those depths. Looking forward to Microsoft cleaning this up but I haven'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't bring much engineering talent to the table either. So revamping it will be a true test of Microsoft's resurgence into the web following a string of bad executions.
- etangent 10y ago> It prompts me every now and again to congratulate people on job anniversaries--maybe people do that but it's a weak play when a company reaches to those depths. So what? Facebook prompts me to congratulate on people's birthdays, and Facebook is doing quite well.
- aleem 10y ago> Facebook prompts me to congratulate on people's birthdays, and Facebook is doing quite well. So What? :) Snapchat compels people to post videos of their cats and daily humdrum. And it also does quite well.
- etangent 10y agoYou seem to be proving my point.
- alexandersingh 10y agoApples and oranges. Also, this has been a common spectacle for me: Click here to congratulate Jill for reaching her ninth anniversary at Yoyodyne! "..But Jill left that company 5 years ago.."
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoI don'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'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'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't use Azure but because they like it, its because its the one that run Windows. Nadella isn't the Steve Jobs of MS. He's, at best, the Melissa Mayer of MS. He'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's its PSVR/Vive competitor? Why are bing results still terrible? Why is Win10 still unliked? Why isn'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's broken with MS instead of just buying customers, many of whom will end up leaving anyway when a new competitor comes around. There'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.
- lawnchair_larry 10y agoWho is Melissa Mayer?
- torgeek 10y agoto be fair some get junked in to azure because of bizspark as well.
- braderhart 10y agoYou 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.
- rbanffy 10y agos/Googled/Bing'ed/
- CRConrad 10y agoNo, I think that was the point.
- castell 10y ago$26.2bn / 400mio user = $65 per user Facebook paid $30 to acquire WhatsApp. (And afaik similar what Murdoch paid for MySpace.)
- josephmx 10y agoNot all users are equal, I'd argue a LinkedIn user is worth more than a WhatsApp user
- uudecode 10y ago"To be honest, they're probably buying the users, not the product." I thought the same when they invested in "Facebook" and gave some kid with a website 17M or so. And then when they overpaid for Skype. I would not say "probably" any more. They are buying users. Maybe it's the only way they can stay in the game.
- rev_null 10y agoBut, they could buy the users for a fraction of the price from any number of shady vendors.
- cylinder 10y agoSatya & Weiner (there's your sitcom title) were just on Bloomberg and explained the acquisition. I'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.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoI really don't understand why business people use so many buzzwords. Do they really think we're all like, "Yeah, man! Cool!"? Everyone, and I mean everyone, knows sentences filled with business buzzwords are meaningless bull poop.
- cylinder 10y agoIt's because they have nothing else to say. They really don't know why these companies are valued the way they are aside from these buzzwords they keep hearing. LinkedIn isn't a hypergrowth company. Every professional I know has a profile on it and so is every recruiter. Their stock is below its peak. They make a paltry income as a mature company. So, all that's left are magical buzzwords to make you think "something is brewing that will eventually make money." Nope. MSFT gets conned once again buying a trophy.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoIndeed. At what point does marshmallow fluff stop costing billions of dollars?
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoThe enterprise world loves LinkedIn. Guess who makes a poop ton of money catering to the enterprise?
- Pxtl 10y agoWell, they gave a good college try at interfacing with existing social networks. When Windows Phone 7 launched, the MS web/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's called isn't it?) Then they bought skype and APIs shifted and things fell apart, but for a while it was really neat. I'm not surprised to see MS say "screw it" and just buy their own.