What they actually said:
"Ha ha ha ha ha! This is going to be great."
(hears noise, turns quickly)
"Whoops, Hi Nadella. Great doing business with you. Thanks for the check man, let's get together again sometime soon."
"Remember that dystopian view of the future in which technology displaces millions of people from their jobs? It's happening." So begins the less-than-cheery explanation of the huge $26.2bn acquisition of LinkedIn to staff by its CEO Jeff Weiner. Weiner appears to recognize that for many of his employees, being acquired by …
"Why LinkedIn Monetizers yes, and Microsoft Monetizers not?"
LinkedIn is mostly neutral with no direct ties to anyone. Microsoft has a vested interest in Microsoft (as it should). So now, a site used mostly for professional networking* is all of a sudden owned by a very biased party.
* so there HAVE been an awful lot of Facebook style posts there lately, which is forcing me to re-eval my relationship with them, prior to the MS buyout.
@energystar, from my perspective I am on LinkedIn for my benefit - it's all about career progression and professional networking. Yes, LinkedIn monetize my details (which are not open to everyone, just those organizations, such as recruiters, willing to pay for the access - my public profile is relatively limited in its scope) but in the end I benefit too. I got my current job through being contacted on LinkedIn.
Now tell me how I benefit from Microsoft's data slurping...
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You hit the nail on the head m8, Its the user data it wants, all that user slurping data to add to its Win 10 data !!!
Sheeeesh !
I you have a LinkedIn account then I suggest destroying it and damn quickly before MacroSlurp gets its beady claws into it !
I can see a lot of Win 7 and Linux users trashing their accounts ASAP - ROFL - Run for the hills !
I you have a LinkedIn account then I suggest destroying it and damn quickly before MacroSlurp gets its beady claws into it !
As far as I can tell from continued accuracy after I all but cleared out my profile, LinkedIn doesn't delete anything, it just makes it unavailable. As far as I can tell it's still hanging on to all the data I naïvely gave them (years ago before privacy became a real issue).
"As far as I can tell from continued accuracy after I all but cleared out my profile, LinkedIn doesn't delete anything, it just makes it unavailable. As far as I can tell it's still hanging on to all the data I naïvely gave them (years ago before privacy became a real issue)."
Facebook is the same unless you really go through the hoops to get it deleted. They still count your account as being active so they can 'monetize' your non activity.
Sooooo, my Facebook account that I use because others need me to have one, is a non related cove and not one single fact therin is correct account wise.
Now, you shouldn't trust multi-million cooperation because first and foremost things evolve around their revenue and nothing else. But... I also think it's fair to say that out of all the companies out there Microsoft has proven themselves to be more caring about the individual users privacy than others. Well, at least that's the impression I've been getting.
Just read their several user agreements. Heck, lets take a very easy example: my Windows phone. Every time I used a certain feature for the first time (keyboard, speech recognition, e-mail, etc.) I got asked if I would allow Microsoft access to some data for "improvements". You know, the commonly used "phone home" feedback. I even skipped a few because I was not in the mood for those questions because I wanted to get some work done.
Each and every time the option turned out to be opt-in. It was disabled by default and the question was basically if I'd allow them to activate it. Most phones have all this stuff turned on by default, making it opt-out.
Microsoft has done some severely stupid and intrusive things, I'm not denying any of that, but in this current situation (also looking at the several end user agreements) I'd sooner trust Microsoft with more personal data than, say, Google (even though, in all honesty, Google also never makes a secret out of it that they want to make money from using your data).
Of course anything can change.
I'd sooner trust Microsoft with more personal data than, say, Google (even though, in all honesty, Google also never makes a secret out of it that they want to make money from using your data).
I won't, and not because they have used opt-in a lot. I won't because they haven't got the first clue of security. Based on more than 2 decades worth of experience using Microsoft products, I have the impression that their idea of security is pretending that risks don't exist. I wouldn't want them, their products or their services anywhere near anything confidential or protectively marked.
From a security perspective, Microsoft has never been anything but a malignant infestation so if you thought LinkedIn couldn't get any worse, just watch.
"We are in pursuit of a common mission centered on empowering people and organizations. " -Satya Nadella.
'Microsoft is saving the company...'
Well... We'll see. If Microsoft ACTUALLY empowering LinkedIn minions' environment, providing them with whatever necessary to effectively advance in the now Wider panorama. [Should I express likeness about Satya attitude?].
MS should have a strong watch on LinkedIn' work ambiance, if really wishing to nourish that Team.
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Not only do I not have to post a bullshit CV to LinkedIn I also get to run Linux.
Fuckin' Karma.
My sympathies to all of you left in the 'rat race'... I'll just get back to my Roasted Sausage, Bacon and Cheese Mashed Potato Bake. If Lester is interested I'll publish the recipe on FacePlant, assuming he cannot work it out for himself and I have a FacePlant account.
"We are in pursuit of a common mission centered on empowering people and organizations. Along with the new growth in our Office 365 commercial and Dynamics businesses, this deal is key to our bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes,"
Slurp finally got the windows 10 bullshit generator working!
Finally time to upgrade, folks?
Man is that yesterdays tech. Sorta like FriendsReUnited... Cool for a while then? Passe and then totally uncool.
I'm actually glad that MS has wasted their money again.
Anon because (shame on me) I actually have a LinkedIn account. Honest Guv, it was only created so that I could view prospective employee's details. It thinks I am still at my job before the last one so it is bang uptodate.
I'll delete it once the deal has closed. Thank god I'm retiring soon.
No Windows 10 and no LinkedIn. What's not to like eh? {don't answer that...}
All this coverage of this acquisition on the The Register, yet I haven't seen anyone make the point that potentially LinkdIn's biggest competitor is the long established recruitment agency industry. They were making money from their own silos of user/client-provided data long before Facebook et al were on the scene, agencies that would take a percentage of someone's earnings. What value would they add? Why, no more than consult their databases and liaises with employers and employees.
LinkdIn has the potential to disrupt that - if anything else, it could automate the process of checking references, from the point of view of recruiters.
This isn't my point of view, but one that given to me in a pub by the head of recruitment for a large company a few years back.
"empowering". .... "get [stuff] done"
The slavishness (no pun intended) with which MS lersistently re-cycles its mantras is worthy of Stalin.
Does anyone know how they enforce the prescribed MS dictionary? Is there an office at Redmond which has the power to veto any public pronouncement which does not use the mandated spin terms?
found 2 posts.
1) Open Sourcing Photon ML LinkedIn's Scalable Machine Learning Library for Spark. Machine learning is a key component of LinkedIn's relevance-driven products. We use machine learning to train the ranking algorithms for our feed, advertising, recommender systems (such as People You May Know), email optimization, search engines, and more.
2) "registreer je voor het webinar met kenner Yorick Dokter" sponsored by Microsoft Nederland (never saw this s** before).
No need to give your password now to see who you already know on LinkedIn.
Ok maybe these details are (hopefully) salt/encrypted on MS servers. But what of the MetaData? To send emails MS needs to know to whom you are sending messages to. This instantly connects you to anyone you correspond with. So what? Not important to you, you know who you correspond with. But what about all of the people connected to you (or ditto to your correspondent)? Do they know you are corresponding with this person? You could be head-hunting a competitor's employee. How nice of MS to tell your competitor's MD that there is a link between you and that head hunted employee. It blows confidentiality out of the water.
Pundits may find this useful when determining where the next take-over bid is occurring, even during the initial seeds of talks. Looking at the linkages between different people will become an interesting tool. You elicit information from a CEO. You then become linked to that person. Now watch who that CEO becomes linked with.
<snip>
"Pundits may find this useful when determining where the next take-over bid is occurring, even during the initial seeds of talks. Looking at the linkages between different people will become an interesting tool. You elicit information from a CEO. You then become linked to that person. Now watch who that CEO becomes linked with."
That is already being done on various levels. You can't beat a bit of frequency and pattern analysis for tracking down people and there intentions. Also good for decryption etc. but that is another kettle of monkeys and barrel of fish.
My guesses:
1) Nadella believes LinkedIn works like rent-a-coder, just not only developers. Expect it to be full of cheap consultants from India in a short time. They will appear in Office instead of Clippy.
2) Given the premium, expect someone "close to Nadella" to have harvested LinkedIn shares in the past months. If I were a Microsoft shareholder, I would ask for an investigation. It doesn't make sense to pay so much for a company well past its peak and with no real perspective of a boost in revenues, and without competition to buy it.
3) Nadella wants to transform Microsoft from a tech company to a "social" (data harvesting and reselling) one. Not a good impression to give when you want to sell "cloud" services too. Or maybe it's a new business model - "pay money, or you'll pay with your data (some we will harvest anyway)".
4) Nadella is more clueless than Ballmer, and that tells a lot. He has no real idea how to move the company forward, no "vision", thereby he has to "copy", and he does copy wrong. He's also quite egotist, I'm quite sure he wanted to kill Lumia phones because it wasn't an idea of his. Ballmer and even a CEO like Carly Fiorina will look a genius after Nadella.
Then I could put the following into a matrix:
In the aerospace business, we call what's about to happen as a powered decent into the terrain.
For far less than $26b, M$ could have built their own site and had money left over for a World Cup/Super Bowl barrage of ads telling everybody how great it is. (it's like suggesting that Apple buy Tesla Motors for $30b + when they can develop their own car for far less.)
Scenario, M$ loots the database and merges it into their own info-farm, crashes the company and writes off the whole purchase price (takes a charge against earnings or other biz-speak term). Pricing intangibles is a voodoo art and I'm sure they could argue in a tome to rival War and Peace that the database is worth nothing so they can take the entire purchase price as a loss.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear of a laptop being stolen from a car with the entire LinkedIn database on the hard drive (or SSD if they're hip).
M$ is a has-been company that seems to be thrashing around to find themselves again and "makes" 10 figure mistakes trying to get into markets that are already established and dominated by just a few players (mobile phones, IOS vs. Android, Zune vs. iPod, etc). I find it hard to believe that M$ is $26b stupid so soon after the Nokia debacle. There must be something there that they covet, but I don't think that it's the LinkedIn business as a whole.
My concern is for Lynda.com that was just acquired by LinkedIn. I can live without LinkedIn, but Lynda.com is an awesome resource for training and I use them a lot.
Thinking of canceling your LinkedIn account? Don't!. Start removing a little bit of information each month. A past job, a contact or two until there is nothing left but a shell. Almost nobody will delete your information when you close your account. It simply goes in a private section and still gets sold to data miners like Spokeo. Canceling may prompt a snapshot and archive routine, but slowly editing looks just like somebody keeping their info up to date. I might be wrong, but ….
> "I wouldn't be surprised to hear of a laptop being stolen from a car with the entire LinkedIn database on the hard drive"
LinkedIn have already been breached, multiple times. From the first page on google:
2016: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/24/linkedin_password_leak_hack_crack/
2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_LinkedIn_hack
Not that your data will be any safer in Microsoft's hands. Is their outlook.com password policy still only allowing maximum of 16 characters? Hello NSA, nice bruteforce script you got there :D
And that price... still can't get over it. Guess there is value in spam networks after all.
I'll get my coat, I'm off to work on my spam network business plan.
"We would partner on how best to leverage this extraordinary combination of assets while pursuing a shared mission."
Shouldn't that read as
"We would partner on how best to leverage this extraordinary combination of other peoples assets and how to monetise it, while pursuing a shared mission of keeping my job."
FTFY
and an opportunity for somebody, especially one of MS's competitors, to re-invent a careers-seeking, job networking, with peripheral social networking thingie. They need the resources to scale it, and the affability to make it only as annoying as LinkedIn already is--for MS will surely take it in the direction they know best.