Coté Memo #11 - Why would MSFT buy LinkedIn? Lots-o-links too!
What’s more delightful than finding a cup of coffee you forgot about earlier in the morning? Bonus coffee, more than you thought was left.
I have some trips coming up, not least of which is the week in Poland. I’ll be speaking at a meet-up in Warsaw and then twice at Devoxx.PL in Kraków. Hopefully this poison ivy I have will be abated as much as possible by my flight!
Below are some items from me of late, my round-up of Microsoft buying LinkedIn, and then the usual list of interesting links.
This one’s long. MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
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I’ll be talking on DevOps and generally hanging out with the cloud native folks. You can get $300 off registration when you use the code pivotal-cote-300.
Microsoft buying LinkedIn
I think everyone was surprised by this news. I’ve been collecting some “why would they do this?” reasoning for this week’s Software Defined Talk recording. But, that’s at the end of the week, so here’s my raw notes so far:
- Slideshare, extended to all Office formats.
- Login with LinkedIn + AD = SSO won.
- Also: “Massively scaling the reach and engagement of LinkedIn by using the network to power the social and identity layers of Microsoft’s ecosystem of over one billion customers. Think about things like LinkedIn’s graph interwoven throughout Outlook, Calendar, Active Directory, Office, Windows, Skype, Dynamics, Cortana, Bing and more.”
- 433 million professionals in LinkedIn (from MSFT internal memo).
- …but it’s probably all the same people, tho.
- “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.” (MSFT CEO, from MSFT internal memo)
- Ads and dumb-AI context: “This combination will make it possible for new experiences such as a LinkedIn newsfeed that serves up articles based on the project you are working on and Office suggesting an expert to connect with via LinkedIn to help with a task you’re trying to complete. As these experiences get more intelligent and delightful, the LinkedIn and Office 365 engagement will grow. And in turn, new opportunities will be created for monetization through individual and organization subscriptions and targeted advertising.” (MSFT CEO, from MSFT internal memo).
- LinkedIn growth since Dec, 2008: “Our team has grown from 338 people to over 10,000, our membership from 32M to over 433M and our revenue from $78M to over $3 billion.” (LinkedIn internal memo).
- Others from memo: Lynda training inline in MSFT apps; paid content in MSFT apps (a la Spiceworks); HR and recruiting.
- Deal PR deck - pretty good. I can see how the social graph and all the “semantic web sit” in LinkedIn, crossed with MSFT assets works well.
- One take on ads, doesn’t like the Office angle, cause privacy, but oh wait: Google Apps and GMail do that (or have the shadow-y threat of being able to do that) and we sort of are OK with it.
- It’s the 1 dataset MS can keep out of Facebook and Google’s hands.
- “Microsoft could improve LinkedIn”: Microsoft designs for people who have to do boring things with computers in order to make money. It’s the 9–5 software vendor.
- Yammer and Skype - maybe LinkedIn people know what to do with those. (Microsoft doesn’t seem to divest of things too often, but those two would be nice to get rid of: or, finally fix Skype and have it be a proper messaging and voice platform, crossed with Yammer that competes with what Slack is becoming.)
Overall, it seems interesting. I like the idea of fixing up the parts of LinkedIn that are weird - esp. the activity feed which is a mess: they should have it be more like Nuzzel, which Microsoft could also acquire.
My key deal rational synergies (“what does Microsoft hope to achieve?”):
- Microsoft now has a legit answer for “social.” It may not be the best, but it’s a $3bn answer.
- A bi-directional channel - Microsoft can sell more stuff into LinkedIn (a la how Spiceworks monetizes, as noted above), and LinkedIn can hustle Microsoft stuff more.
- Advertising and understanding users, in their professional life - Facebook knows everything about you, and now Microsoft would know everything about your 9-5 life (assuming you pump as much stuff into LinkedIn as people like I do).
- Identity - this usually turns out to be a fool’s errand; I’ve heard the theory of controlling identity management from the cloud FOREVER and nothing much comes of it. However, when coupled with ActiveDirectory and the install base of Windows, using LinkedIn as an identity has potential. Notice that it’s one of the built in identities/accounts you can add in OS X/macOS/iOS. No idea if so in Windows, but I bet so soon if not.
- Running cloud, esp. SaaSes - both companies have cloud competencies, now they have more.
Overall, it’s still weird - but it’s not dumb-weird.
Coté Content
While Texas moistens up, we talk about the morals of rich tech folks suing journalists, the state of open source business, the history of the BI market, and how to use the Meeker decks. Check out the full show notes for links to the recommendations, conferences, and tech news items we didn’t get to cover.
We spend this week talking about workload scheduling, starting with Mesos. It’s a fun ride from CONTROL-M to Lambda, along with Cloud Foundry and serverless. So get ready to beat a horse into glue. Plus, how to handle gifts for father’s day and the usual recommendations at the end.
We’ve got a new format for the Pivotal podcast I do, Pivotal Conversations. I asked Richard Seroter to come co-host a weekly episode with me. We cover cloud native related news first and then discuss a topic - and soon! - or interview a guest for the second half. You know: ripping off the Speaking in Tech format. We’ll be posting these to the Pivotal blog as usual, but you can also see them in SoundCloud (which will publish a little ahead of the Pivotal blog), iTunes, or just subscribe to the raw RSS feed. There’s two episode so far: we discuss CF Summit and talk about dealing with legacy.
I’m giving a 90 minute overview of agile for an agency later this month. Here’s my slides, so far. As ever, “government” is just an extra layer of sprinkles on-top of advice for all large organizations. There’s some extensive (for me) talking points in the slide notes if you’re into that kind of thing.
I’ve been working on this white paper for a long time with Rohit Kelapure - the title pretty much says it all: it’s advice on moving your ESB-driven architecture to a cloud native approach. Rohit did pretty much all of the writing, I just came in and gave it a “script treatment.” Tell me what you think of it.
Links!
“USAA plans to hire about 100 people in Austin in information technology and design to work on web applications.”
Juicy quotes and such from the recent Cloud Foundry Summit.
It’s always good to see more commentary on this. I (hopefully) will be doing my column this month at The Register on this topic.
All your charts are belong to us.
HP has a big foot-hold in ALM.
Stitcher sold for $4.5m (on $25m in funding?!)
- Midroll Media sold for $60m
“Since Ringelmann in 1913 we’ve known that individual performance tends to decrease with increasing group size.”
AKA: “diseconomies of scale.”
Case of a software company doing pair programming. They ended up doing it in moderation after initial excitement.
What’s up with the term? Good check-in on “PaaS” from Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk.
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