Microsoft announced their largest acquisition ever earlier this week. The tech giant is set to buy the professional social networking site LinkedIn for a record setting $26.2 billion. 
(Photo Credit: bfishadow/Flickr)
What does this mean for these corporations, and what does it mean for users?
“This deal is all about bringing together the world’s leading professional cloud and the world’s leading professional network,” Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft said in an interview with CNBC which was shared by The New York Times. He gave the interview alongside LinkedIn’s CEO, Jeff Weiner “If you think about how people work today, it’s split between these two worlds,”said Nadella.
Nadella, who became CEO back in February of 2014, went on to explain how the opportunity to combine these systems and tools will lead to an expansion for the company and also for the consumer who he anticipates will benefit in turn from the centralization of these powerful resources.
What does this tell us about how the industry is changing?
Serious conversation about the acquisition began in February, according to Nadella, but Weiner said he’d been thinking about a combination for the companies long before then.
“For us, it’s always been about the realization of our long-term objectives, mission, and vision, and this combination very meaningfully accelerates our ability to realize those goals,” Weiner told CNBC. “It also takes our scale to a completely different level.”
Weiner explained that intensifying competition in recent years helped lead him toward the belief that it would be best for the company’s future to team up with a larger corporation.
“It used to be that scale was hundreds of millions of users and billions of dollars of market cap,” Weiner explained. “Today it’s billions of users and customers and hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. And, the combination of our two companies, having Microsoft behind us, just enables us to realize the things that we always dreamt of doing, and so we’re excited about it.”
We’ll have to wait and see what happens next…
There is a significant amount of potential in the combination of these two entities. Microsoft Office, combined directly with LinkedIn, for example, could help meeting attendants learn more about one another beforehand and connect with each other more meaningfully after their business is through. The possibilities are exciting. Both companies, and their customers, should anticipate some profound changes.
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