LinkedIn Users May See The Dark Side Of Takeover
If you are a LinkedIn user, then Microsoft just brought your CV and your list of professional contacts, and, furthermore, paid over the top for them!
The Seattle-based old timer paid a walloping 26 billion dollars to acquire the business networking site, along with the records of its 433 million members.
That sum, at over 60 dollars for every LinkedIn user, represented half as much again as the company was valued on the stock market at the time.
That leaves us to ponder what Microsoft saw where shareholders didn’t and, more particularly, how it intends to leverage its investment.
We can presume that it sees money to be made out of knowing who works where and in what professions.
Google hoovers up information on where we go and what stuff we enquire about for its intelligence about us.
Facebook looks at who our friends are and how we socialise.
Is information about our working lives a gap which lets Microsoft in to influence the way businesses spend money?
Will all pharmacists on LinkedIn find themselves bombarded with ads for drugs companies and security managers with offers of new access management solutions?
Does Microsoft have ideas for some fancy super improved recruitment algorithms that will, say, pick purchasing managers across the West Midlands to be pinged when a Solihull client has a new senior buyer opportunity?
Or maybe it plans to ‘help executives network even more effectively,’ but only if they are using Office or Outlook, of course?
Whatever, we can be sure that LinkedIn regulars will see it grow a dark side over the next couple of years , when Microsoft plays its hand.
