Captain highsight here, and I missed out on a golden opportunity to pick up some LNKD when it was trading at $110. The $26B pricetag seems too high to me. CRM might have been a better pursuit.
LNKD has staying power. it has been 14 years since LNKD launched and virtually no competition that whole time. i’ll come out and say this will likely turn out to be MSFT’s best acquisition. lots of cross-selling opportunity and ability to leverage acquired talent in other businesses. in acquiring LNKD, they also add a potential future CEO in Jeff Weiner. it’s a long-term bet but i’d say it looks like a pretty safe one.
Yep given MSFT’s great record in mega acquisitions money well spent IMO.
Did they really need to pay 50% premium to market value? If they said, hey LinkedIn shareholders, we’re going to give you 25% more money, would they get rejected?
Should’ve bought CRM, they probably assigned CRM’s multiple to the deal which is pretty dumb. Offer price is around where it was trading in Feb before it took a dump, I guess it’s more psychological to the shareholders that they recoop the losses from earlier this year.
MSFT, trendsetter as always. I’m sure this will be the Zune to Apple’s iPod and the Newscorp Myspace purchase to Facebook’s Instagram.
What everyone has been pleading for on the internet is a networking site where their personal online social media presence can be tied to their professional reputation so you’re either left with a heavily censored user base or a method to be spammed by employers, poorly written industry blogs and HR reps (likely the only real users).
They did try buying CRM last year. Too pricey!
Another historic startup going down the drain. Microsoft just kills the enterprise spirit.
A bargain exit for Linkedin shareholders…
lots of HF gurus and superstar investor felt LNKD was worth $280 per share last year (that what it traded at)… earnings dissapointed in the last few quarters but a few years of growth and a $190 could look like a bargain… the purchase premim of 50% brings it back to what it was trading at earlier in the year.
i’m not sure why so many of you are down on LNKD.
no competition, very little chance of becoming obsolete any time soon, best way to move up the ladder for those who weren’t born on 3rd base. i’ve gotten several reasonable job offers off LNKD without having to do anything but maintain a basic profile. if you have clients, prospects or meet industry peeps, they all look at your linkedin to verify you’re not some scam artist and also for contact info if they happen to not have it. while LNKD is not likely to be a perpetual high growth story, it is conceivable that the userbase will grow as membership will be required for less and less technical jobs. in 10 years, if i was a plumber, if being on LNKD means i get job offers and in turn the ability to push for higher wages at my current job, why wouldn’t i join LNKD. also, they haven’t done much if anything to monetize the user base. i think lynda.com is a great example of the cross-selling opportunity on LNKD. further, there is opportunity for LNKD to do for professionals, small businesses and sole proprietorships what facebook has done for large corporations and retail-oriented small businesses. a key landing page that offers ease of contact and social connection.
With all due respect, anyone who thought that is an idiot.
Love LNKD as a user, don’t see too much monetization opportunities, only reason it’s even cash flow positive is because of ridiculous amount of stock based compensation.
Not sure if you notice the same thing, but it seems like a lot of social media junk is slowly making its way over to LinkedIn. Add this to whatever new monetization methods Microsoft has planned and I could see this fail. Alternatively, they could cement their position by adding additional information (think Glassdoor) that is value add to the job searchers experience or further cater towards the job posters.
I don’t see too much monetization opportunities with bigger companies unless they can come up of a way to screen all those applications (sometimes thousands), right now the job application function is still pretty bad as applicants can just submit a resume without additional screening, I see many postings are just there to redirect applicants to the companies’ websites. Again tremendous value for users but not much value added to justify bigger spending by large corporations except smaller firms that don’t have a HR department.