Microsoft just bought LinkedIn For $196/Share

[Marc]

Who needs real money?

Microsoft announced that it would buy LinkedIn for $196/share, a massive 50% premium to the Friday closing price of $131. The total deal size is $26.2 billion and according to the press release, MSFT will finance the transaction primarily through the issuance of new debt.

Your personal information is valuable! Add in Windows 10 phoning home all the info you have, and what do you get?

The big get even bigger...

 

[Michael_M]

{Sarcasm} Someone has to fight Googles information quest, between Microsoft, Google, and Disney's quests to know everything about everyone the best we can say is at least it's not all one company (yet). {end Sarcasm}

 

[hogheavenfarm]

So I just cancelled my Linked In account and switched to Ubuntu. I use Startpage as my search engine and Protonmail for email.
I hope my green belt in anti-MS/Google VooDoo is sufficient....

 

[Ronen E]

Linked-In is just a marketing / job search site, since a long time. I lost interest years ago and I don't have any valuable info there, or so I think.

Their last change to group discussions (several months ago) has made it near impossible to even read the discussions you're interested in (and not those someone is interested that you read).

 

[Marc]

Interesting article: https://arstechnica.com/information...cant-make-sense-of-microsoft-buying-linkedin/

 

[Jen Kirley]

From an article on NPR:

In a call with investors, Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner presented their grand plan: to digitize the world's workforce, or as they put it, to digitally map the world's economy. That means a digital profile for all members of the global workforce, employers and academic institutions combined with a digital representation of every available job, of required skills and options where to learn them.

Looks like a good time to delete my account.

 

[Steve Prevette]

I'll just supply the story that I got contacted by a head-hunter through Linked-In for an "operations research" opportunity. It ended up being for one of the big four railroads in the US (CSX, NS, BNSF, UP) for a senior job in their ops research dept. Given that my hobby is designing operations for model railroads (see bhbf.weebly.com) this would have been my dream job. But it was a significant pay cut from working in the nuclear industry so took a pass. I dunno, there is some advantage to having a presence on linked-in but yes, some of the privacy issues of MS and Windows 10 are getting worrisome.

 

[Marc]

Some people like it a lot - Mainly recruiters and people, and companies, wanting to promote themselves and their services. I'm not really much into it. It was another multi-billion $$$ company which didn't make money. Even investors got it in the end. The stock was over US$300 last year.

Steve is right, though - On some tech sites I frequent, while the majority of them pretty much hate linkedin, some had very good experiences with it getting jobs.

As to their information harvesting - It's pretty inevitable anyway. The internet and technology have changed things forever. Not to mention the NSA and it's cronies. Shades of 1984... Too old to care.

 

[mguilbert]

Does anyone think they will break up MS for violating anti-trust like Ma-Bell. One can only hope.
I do have no love for Billy Gates and his merry band of misfits that stop offering something that works ie XP. Then give a deeply flawed system like Vista, and fix it with seven so you feel better.
I also love the WIFI sense feature in 10 that automatically allowed all of you contacts to access your wifi without a password. A least they finally made the default setting to off after many complaints. If you do have 10 make sure the wifi sense is turned off. I know people who had elevated data usage on their mobile devices because of this. It also could allow customers, vendors, and auditors who visit to have access.

 

[Marc]

No breakup. These days the "new normal" is for companies to gobble up other companies - The bigger the better.

In fact, I just switched to Cincinnati Bell Fioptics - Fiber to the house. Had been with Roadrunner which became Time Warner for about 12 to 15 years (I forget exactly). They kept raising prices and Time Warner merged with Charter communications and is now "Spectrum". Last price rise was close to 20%.

Weird - Fioptics is charging about 30% of the price Time Warner (Spectrum) wants for the same speed. I'm trying Fioptics gigabit now. Just got hooked up yesterday.

Anyway - Just look around. Mega-companies is the "new normal". Helps a lot with lobbying congress critters...

...I do have no love for Billy Gates and his merry band of misfits that stop offering something that works ie XP. ...

I still have a computer running XP (well, I haven't used it in a few years), a laptop with XP (used recently on a trip - It's sort a "travel" computer) and have XP on a VM on my Mac.