Microsoft targets enterprise market with LinkedIn buy, but is there a better fit?
Microsoft’s move to acquire LinkedIn has many scratching their heads trying to realize potential synergies. Having missed the mobile boom (remember that disaster buying Nokia’s mobile phone business?), Microsoft is turning increasingly toward the enterprise market. With employers being increasingly less able to find applicants with the needed skill set, perhaps Microsoft can build d on LinkedIn’s Talent Solution and recently acquired online education business to further penetrate the enterprise market. LinkedIn’s messaging platform in a corporate setting, would also combat others entering the fray. Interesting as that may or may not be, we see a few other combinations that would have fit LinkedIn far better.
“Microsoft can drive the evolution of the competency marketplace in ways LinkedIn as a standalone company couldn’t,” says Ryan Craig, managing director of private equity fund University Ventures, which focuses on the higher education sector. “They can offer a complete HR solution.”
Consider that two-thirds of LinkedIn’s revenue already comes from the “talent solutions” it provides to businesses’ human resources departments, and that it’s a popular tool for salespeople looking for clients (paywall). Add in LinkedIn’s purchase of online education company Lynda last year, and it’s not hard to see how the platform—with integration into a larger company that caters to businesses, like, say, Microsoft—could become an essential part of the way employers pick and train their employees. A LinkedIn-Microsoft product would not only help workers work, but also teach them the skills to get hired in the first place.
Source: Microsoft buying LinkedIn could transform the way we’re taught, trained, and hired for jobs — Quartz
