Microsoft to buy LinkedIn

Microsoft have just bought LinkedIn which unsurprisingly is one of the biggest tech deals in history.  

The move, costing around £18.5bn (over $26bn if you do the ‘math’) in cash, is thought to is aid their bold ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes. The deal will help Microsoft boost sales of its business and email software but what does it mean for LinkedIn?

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, now has a new boss in the form of Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. Will this be a relationship made in tech heaven? Weiner has said the company would remain as a fully independent entity within Microsoft.  Many active YouTube users didn’t notice too much of a difference back in the day after the Google purchase so it could all be possible. 

With the Microsoft purchase though only time will tell as whether LinkedIn can maintain its distinct brand that recruiters, candidates and clients have grown to know, love and hate sometimes, in equal measure. With more than 7 million active job listings, it was just last month that LinkedIn faced large-scale global embarrassment with 117 million accounts compromised. Despite more people appearing to use LinkedIn, they made a loss of £116 million ($166 million) last year.

With 433 million members worldwide, many people feel that their daily news feed now resembles Facebook, with professional and social lines increasingly blurred. This probably is helped by the fact that 60 per cent of its users are on mobiles as opposed to their PC.

There will need to be some decisions on what makes sense to integrate and what does not. The latest acquisition could see its network being interwoven through Microsoft's Outlook, Office, Skype and Window to make a connect professional world. The two companies will need to work together, particularly on Office 365 - Microsoft's suite of productivity programs including Outlook and Word and Dynamics, its customer service software.

Monday instantly sent LinkedIn's share price soaring by 50 percent on LinkedIn's closing price on Friday with Microsoft paying $191 per share.

What about the LinkedIn culture and independence? It is believed that both companies share many of the same attributes caring about individual and collective growth. As LinkedIn and Microsoft set of  in pursuit of a common mission focused on empowering people and organisations from the heat of the Silicon Valley, what will this mean for us 20 million users in the UK, and how many of those 20 million user will care?