Ah, I see. I have to admit I haven't knowingly enabled notifications from anything else so all I get are Adobe updates / GeForce drivers / new hardware notifications. I dread to think how disruptive it would be to get a desktop notification every time I get a piece of recruiter spam on LinkedIn!
I thought so. But surely then the announcement would be "LinkedIn Windows Store app coming soon". I read it as some lower level integration with the Live account I use to sign in to Windows. Perhaps I'm being overly paranoid.
Microsoft owns my "employee" identity thru office 365.
I don't love them owning my "job-searching" identity too.
Seems like the most valuable service they have to offer is to corporations. "Want to know how often your employee is updating their resume? Pay us for access." Of course they'll spin it differently, but in short that's the value.
And then they will also use that information to help other companies poach your employees, at best. At worst, the data will be purchased for some sales team to identify and target your company to sign some wildly overpriced long term sales contract. They will know employee behavior and who the key prospects are in your organization.
It has happened before.
Even I was shocked how tens of thousands of companies handed over mind blowingly valuable customer data to Facebook. They aggressively promoted their Facebook Page to their customer base: please like us on Facebook!
What did Facebook do? They took that data and sold it to competitors as ad inventory. I never saw a single company owner complain. Companies spent millions of dollars and years of effort building up a customer base, and just handed it right over to Facebook.
To put it in more blunt terms, Facebook stole companies assets through social engineering. I saw friends turn around and build profitable, multi-million dollar businesses through this single data usurpation channel.
Will companies get more savvy about locking down their data? I'm not counting on it.
Just a pet peeve, but please re-consider the casual use of the word "poach" when referring to companies hiring employees. It reduces a worker's agency to that of a farm animal or wild game, as if they were owned by their employer and "stolen" away by some other employer. I think we can all agree that we are not the property of our employers, so the word "poach" is pretty inappropriate and I'd argue moderately offensive.
The rest of your comment is spot on though, so thanks for posting it.
I was deliberately and enthusiastically nodding with the "we are not the property of our employers" bit. Then you dropped the O-word and now, mostly because I'm curious to the point of disaster, I think I actually kind of need to see one argue that 'poach' is carte-blanche "offensive".
Hard to describe. I'm as uncomfortable with the word as I am uncomfortable being referred to as a "resource" which is also used commonly in business. Personal pet peeve, probably not shared by many.
> It reduces a worker's agency to that of a farm animal or wild game
MS certainly treats Windows users like cattle so there is always a possibility that they would do something similar with job seeker or employee data. There is nothing offensive about pointing out unethical practices of such companies or the potential to abuse the data.
I don't really get it. Active Directory and Exchange already do all that at the enterprise level. Integrating with LinkedIn will simply scare everyone from using LinkedIn.
I like a lot of the stuff MS is doing these days, but this one really doesn't make sense to me. One has an enterprise vision and the other is "extraprise?" It's a very awkward fit.
I can't help but suspect this will be the end of LinkedIn. Why would any firm want Microsoft to have control of so much potential competitive intelligence? As well as the ability to potentially interrupt / snoop on critical communications?
Yeah, LI messages aren't as important to most people as plain email, but LI messages are used for a lot of recruiting and B2B sales stuff. Think about it like this: if I compete with Microsoft, why would I want to continue using LI to contact potential customers (or potential employees for that matter) thereby giving MS access to so much important info?
I wonder if all it's going to take to trigger a mass exodus away from LinkedIn is the emergence of a truly viable competitor?
Strictly speaking that's true. But employers have a fair amount of leverage, especially in terms of recruiting and what-not. I suspect a lot of people are on LI because it serves as a sort of default online resume, and if companies quit recruiting through LinkedIn and switch to something else, I think the users might follow.
OTOH, maybe most people only use LI as an online Rolodex and maybe it'll all turn out to be a moot point. But it still seems dodgy to me to have a major industry player like MS owning LinkedIn. I think I'd find it questionable if anybody else had acquired them as well, although Microsoft's history does add some emphasis to the whole thing in my view.
I think this is potentially an "if you build it" situation in the making. I mean, iirc, LI wasn't the "social network for recruiters" but it kind of turned into that... It's still a fairly poor fit, and while some of the posts on message boards are useful, most are spam.
A more curated social recruiting site is a pretty big potential if one were built... I keep hoping that Stack Exchange will move their careers stuff more in that direction, as they've been one of the better options imho as a developer, but they just don't have the critical mass even in the niche of IT.
Frankly, all the job sites suck... any number of them could make the move to a better UX for all concerned, but part of that really needs to be the empowerment of saying, "Hey, I'm not looking and have been where I am less than a half a year, let me be." That's another thing I wouldn't mind seeing... a place to post your resume, your phone number and email address... A recruiter could put in your email address, or phone number, and it give them your current status, the latest resume and that's it... just an update mechanism to avoid contacting people who'd rather not be bothered. Then they could pay for a hot feed when a resume gets updated, and/or someone marks themselves as passively looking, etc.
I think it comes down to more quality engagement on both sides... It gets tiring to get the constant phone calls for 3 months after starting something, and 3-9 months away from your project coming to an end... that doesn't even consider the FTE-types that will stay somewhere for several years before considering a move.
while only recruiters check their LinkedIn messages, most of them being spam
That does not jibe with my experience at all.
And it goes beyond the messaging thing anyway. LI hosts job postings directly, and has a lot of internal information about all sorts of companies. Now you might say "well, somebody could mine that stuff anyway", and that might be true. But the LI API has some limits and scraping is a PITA.. but now MS has the data with direct access, which makes it far, far easier for them to do something nefarious with it if the urge strikes.
And as much as MS have changed, seemingly for the better, of the past few years, there's still a lot of reason to consider the reasoning behind the old saw "The two biggest tactical mistakes you can make are staging a ground invasion of Russia in the winter, and partnering with Microsoft".
> "The two biggest tactical mistakes you can make are staging a ground invasion of Russia in the winter, and partnering with Microsoft"
While I hole heartily agree with that line of reasoning, in this instance they are buying LinkedIn, not partnering with them.
Skype is still alive.
My problem is that LinkedIn is an overvalued property. I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO.
And mark my words, but Facebook will eat their lunch. Maybe that's why Microsoft bought LinkedIn, as a defensive move. Time will tell.
While I hole heartily agree with that line of reasoning, in this instance they are buying LinkedIn, not partnering with them.
Right, the point referring to that old saw was more of a comment on Microsoft's trustworthiness in general. That is, it is a suggestion that Microsoft are not to be trusted in terms of what they might do with the LI data.
I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO
My primary e-mail is hosted by a small private provider. My secondary e-mail is hosted by a different small private provider. Then come Apple, Google (mostly for groups) and Microsoft.
It's probably safe to assume that a good number of the people that you email use email hosted by Google, Microsoft, etc..., which exposes many of your emails to them.
I think it's pretty sad that these quite big companies don't manage to stay independent. All this power concentrated in very few ecosystems. If fear that the future holds nothing but walled gardens nobody can escape because some big companies bought half the internet and now everybody is depending on them. I think there should be some kind of monopoly-legislature for tech companies regarding walled gardens and a too tight integration of their services without giving 3rd parties a chance. It's seriously hurting the whole country and hampers innovation.
I've closed my LinkedIn account half a year ago and besides less spam from recruiters, my life goes on happily.
I don't think LinkedIn brought any value to me or to my career.. I didn't find a better job and frankly I probably don't want the job that someone on LinkedIn is offering.
$ 26B / 450M users ~= $57 / user
That's how much MS paid for my account. So they think it's valuable, but not for me.
I've got mixed feelings about LinkedIn. On one hand, they're the poster child for dark patterns and persistently trying to sneakily vacuum up and monetize your personal info. On the other hand, and apparently unlike most of HN, I appreciate recruiters reaching out to me and try to answer as many of them as I can even if it's just a polite "no thank you". It's nice to know what's out there even if it's mostly "bottom of the barrel" type jobs. It's also nice to have an easily updatable "online resume". Even if the value LinkedIn provides is $0.01 it's better than a resume in document form sitting on my hard drive which provides me zero value.
I figure as long as I am careful and use reasonable op-sec, using LinkedIn can't hurt, even if it doesn't really help much.
> Redefining social selling through the combination of Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365
When the acquisition was first announced, I stated that Salesforce should be very concerned.[0] Account-based marketing (what they're calling "social selling") is how successful startups (and others) sell to enterprises these days, and they're willing to shell out cash to software that helps them do that.[1] Having consulted many enterprise SaaS companies, I know that having the LinkedIn social graph integrated into their CRM would be worth the hassle of switching from Salesforce to Dynamics 365.
[0] Same reason why I'm selling my Salesforce holdings today.
[1] See dozens of VC-backed ABM software companies sprouting up everywhere and charging $xx,000 annually.
• LinkedIn notifications within the Windows action center
• Enabling members drafting résumés in Word to update their profiles, and discover and apply to jobs on LinkedIn
• Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties
I can't help but feel that the direction they're taking this in will be horrible for the Microsoft experience. It looks like they're trying to monetize LinkedIn integration in Windows…
Would you like me to share it with every recruiter in your extended network? How much are you willing to pay that I don't share it with your coworkers?
I remember back in the day, 1997, when Hotmail ran on FreeBSD and was actually a decent free web mail service.
Then Microsoft bought them, and the usability has been steadily going down since, until I eventually was forced to abandon it: it couldn't even handle plain text ASCII e-mail properly any more (\n's would be eaten and sent e-mail would end up being one huge line).
But of course, it will be all different with LinkedIn this time. Of course it will.
I have a feeling that most of the population will think this is an improvement but personally I try to avoid as much “integration” as possible. I don’t need the universe tied into my E-mail, documents, etc.; I just want tools that can focus on one thing and do it well. The more connected everything is, the more damage you can do by accident (“great, I just E-mailed my entire list of connections via auto-complete and I have no idea how that happened!”, or “why am I receiving system notifications every 10 minutes from the CEO of FoobarCo?”).
This doesn’t mean that I don’t integrate things, it’s just that I usually do so on my own terms. In my experience, 3rd parties are pretty bad at guessing exactly how I want two things to work together. I would rather see services remain open, with several options for tying them together, than have a monolith decide on exactly one way to do it that serves primarily their interests over mine.
* LinkedIn identity and network in Microsoft Outlook and the Office suite
* LinkedIn notifications within the Windows action center
* Enabling members drafting résumés in Word to update their profiles, and discover and apply to jobs on LinkedIn
* Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties
* Enterprise LinkedIn Lookup powered by Active Directory and Office 365
* LinkedIn Learning available across the Office 365 and Windows ecosystem
* Developing a business news desk across our content ecosystem and MSN.com
Few of these features benefit the user.
Good reason to switch to LibreOffice, if you haven't already.
(My last Microsoft Office purchase was Word 97. LibreOffice is pretty good now, although the early years of SunOffice and OpenOffice were painful. I liked Windows 7, and I still have one machine running it, but everything else is Linux now.)
The online stuff from MS is pretty compelling... even though the hosted version isn't quite as good as onsite Exchange, it's still one of the better integrations of an enterprise email + calendar option out there... and the skype for enterprise integration could still be a little better.
I think the web options for office will probably be good enough for most, which is why they pushed that way in light of the google docs properties. This is where the money will be made for MS in the next decade to be sure.
74 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadErr... I'm not sure I like the sound of this. Isn't this just for application updates / system stuff?
Either that or you're living in a parallel universe where LinkedIn is a completely different company.
I don't love them owning my "job-searching" identity too.
Seems like the most valuable service they have to offer is to corporations. "Want to know how often your employee is updating their resume? Pay us for access." Of course they'll spin it differently, but in short that's the value.
It has happened before.
Even I was shocked how tens of thousands of companies handed over mind blowingly valuable customer data to Facebook. They aggressively promoted their Facebook Page to their customer base: please like us on Facebook!
What did Facebook do? They took that data and sold it to competitors as ad inventory. I never saw a single company owner complain. Companies spent millions of dollars and years of effort building up a customer base, and just handed it right over to Facebook.
To put it in more blunt terms, Facebook stole companies assets through social engineering. I saw friends turn around and build profitable, multi-million dollar businesses through this single data usurpation channel.
Will companies get more savvy about locking down their data? I'm not counting on it.
The rest of your comment is spot on though, so thanks for posting it.
This is tough stuff.
It isn't that hard :)
I was deliberately and enthusiastically nodding with the "we are not the property of our employers" bit. Then you dropped the O-word and now, mostly because I'm curious to the point of disaster, I think I actually kind of need to see one argue that 'poach' is carte-blanche "offensive".
/s
MS certainly treats Windows users like cattle so there is always a possibility that they would do something similar with job seeker or employee data. There is nothing offensive about pointing out unethical practices of such companies or the potential to abuse the data.
I like a lot of the stuff MS is doing these days, but this one really doesn't make sense to me. One has an enterprise vision and the other is "extraprise?" It's a very awkward fit.
Yeah, LI messages aren't as important to most people as plain email, but LI messages are used for a lot of recruiting and B2B sales stuff. Think about it like this: if I compete with Microsoft, why would I want to continue using LI to contact potential customers (or potential employees for that matter) thereby giving MS access to so much important info?
I wonder if all it's going to take to trigger a mass exodus away from LinkedIn is the emergence of a truly viable competitor?
OTOH, maybe most people only use LI as an online Rolodex and maybe it'll all turn out to be a moot point. But it still seems dodgy to me to have a major industry player like MS owning LinkedIn. I think I'd find it questionable if anybody else had acquired them as well, although Microsoft's history does add some emphasis to the whole thing in my view.
A more curated social recruiting site is a pretty big potential if one were built... I keep hoping that Stack Exchange will move their careers stuff more in that direction, as they've been one of the better options imho as a developer, but they just don't have the critical mass even in the niche of IT.
Frankly, all the job sites suck... any number of them could make the move to a better UX for all concerned, but part of that really needs to be the empowerment of saying, "Hey, I'm not looking and have been where I am less than a half a year, let me be." That's another thing I wouldn't mind seeing... a place to post your resume, your phone number and email address... A recruiter could put in your email address, or phone number, and it give them your current status, the latest resume and that's it... just an update mechanism to avoid contacting people who'd rather not be bothered. Then they could pay for a hot feed when a resume gets updated, and/or someone marks themselves as passively looking, etc.
I think it comes down to more quality engagement on both sides... It gets tiring to get the constant phone calls for 3 months after starting something, and 3-9 months away from your project coming to an end... that doesn't even consider the FTE-types that will stay somewhere for several years before considering a move.
That does not jibe with my experience at all.
And it goes beyond the messaging thing anyway. LI hosts job postings directly, and has a lot of internal information about all sorts of companies. Now you might say "well, somebody could mine that stuff anyway", and that might be true. But the LI API has some limits and scraping is a PITA.. but now MS has the data with direct access, which makes it far, far easier for them to do something nefarious with it if the urge strikes.
And as much as MS have changed, seemingly for the better, of the past few years, there's still a lot of reason to consider the reasoning behind the old saw "The two biggest tactical mistakes you can make are staging a ground invasion of Russia in the winter, and partnering with Microsoft".
While I hole heartily agree with that line of reasoning, in this instance they are buying LinkedIn, not partnering with them. Skype is still alive.
My problem is that LinkedIn is an overvalued property. I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO.
And mark my words, but Facebook will eat their lunch. Maybe that's why Microsoft bought LinkedIn, as a defensive move. Time will tell.
Right, the point referring to that old saw was more of a comment on Microsoft's trustworthiness in general. That is, it is a suggestion that Microsoft are not to be trusted in terms of what they might do with the LI data.
I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO
Yeah, that's true.
Any ideas?
LinkedIn account: closed.
I don't think LinkedIn brought any value to me or to my career.. I didn't find a better job and frankly I probably don't want the job that someone on LinkedIn is offering.
$ 26B / 450M users ~= $57 / user
That's how much MS paid for my account. So they think it's valuable, but not for me.
I figure as long as I am careful and use reasonable op-sec, using LinkedIn can't hurt, even if it doesn't really help much.
When the acquisition was first announced, I stated that Salesforce should be very concerned.[0] Account-based marketing (what they're calling "social selling") is how successful startups (and others) sell to enterprises these days, and they're willing to shell out cash to software that helps them do that.[1] Having consulted many enterprise SaaS companies, I know that having the LinkedIn social graph integrated into their CRM would be worth the hassle of switching from Salesforce to Dynamics 365.
[0] Same reason why I'm selling my Salesforce holdings today.
[1] See dozens of VC-backed ABM software companies sprouting up everywhere and charging $xx,000 annually.
• Enabling members drafting résumés in Word to update their profiles, and discover and apply to jobs on LinkedIn
• Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties
I can't help but feel that the direction they're taking this in will be horrible for the Microsoft experience. It looks like they're trying to monetize LinkedIn integration in Windows…
Would you like me to share it with every recruiter in your extended network? How much are you willing to pay that I don't share it with your coworkers?
Love, Linky.
Oh, gods. Please no. : [
Then Microsoft bought them, and the usability has been steadily going down since, until I eventually was forced to abandon it: it couldn't even handle plain text ASCII e-mail properly any more (\n's would be eaten and sent e-mail would end up being one huge line).
But of course, it will be all different with LinkedIn this time. Of course it will.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t integrate things, it’s just that I usually do so on my own terms. In my experience, 3rd parties are pretty bad at guessing exactly how I want two things to work together. I would rather see services remain open, with several options for tying them together, than have a monolith decide on exactly one way to do it that serves primarily their interests over mine.
* LinkedIn identity and network in Microsoft Outlook and the Office suite
* LinkedIn notifications within the Windows action center
* Enabling members drafting résumés in Word to update their profiles, and discover and apply to jobs on LinkedIn
* Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft properties
* Enterprise LinkedIn Lookup powered by Active Directory and Office 365
* LinkedIn Learning available across the Office 365 and Windows ecosystem
* Developing a business news desk across our content ecosystem and MSN.com
Few of these features benefit the user.
Good reason to switch to LibreOffice, if you haven't already.
(My last Microsoft Office purchase was Word 97. LibreOffice is pretty good now, although the early years of SunOffice and OpenOffice were painful. I liked Windows 7, and I still have one machine running it, but everything else is Linux now.)
I think the web options for office will probably be good enough for most, which is why they pushed that way in light of the google docs properties. This is where the money will be made for MS in the next decade to be sure.