
The Endgame for LinkedIn Is Coming - hgsyndrome
https://medium.com/@lancengym/the-endgame-for-linkedin-is-coming-31d4a8b2a76
======
alkonaut
I think the problem is that it's trying to become some sort of "pro facebook".

But I have no, zero, interest in actually visiting unless I'm a recruiter. I
don't _care_ that someone posts a motivational video or a colleague celebrates
10 years at Innotek. All I want to do as a non-recruiter is maintain a
reasonably sized network for that time in 5 years when I _do_ want to check my
network. Until then, I don't ever want to log in.

So to me it it does proide value, but how much value do I provide? I suppose
my aging profile does provide some material for recruiters so that the keep
spending for pro recruiter features. But I don't think they'll ever be a
facebook that can have significant ad-revenue from recurring visitors.

~~~
rossdavidh
I would think, and I'm speculating here, that the idea is that the kind of ads
they have, justify a high CPC, precisely because you only go there when you're
looking to hop jobs. Fewer people clicking that ad out of curiousity, with no
possibility of applying for the position posted. $5 CPC makes sense if it gets
you a new employee, since (even if it's only 1% of those clicking who you
hire) that is a small part of total cost of employee acquisition.

I have no idea if this is actually the strategy, or if this is actually
working, I'm just floating it as a possibility. You only go there if you're a
recruiter, or thinking about getting new work, or you have been asked by
somebody else to endorse, and that would be a good thing, in this scenario,
since it improves the signal-to-noise ratio.

~~~
freewilly1040
To paraphrase the point in the context of the GP comment, you might only be
checking it once every five years when you're looking for a new job, but this
means that when you _are_ looking for a new job LinkedIn is the first to know.

~~~
rossdavidh
Wow that is way better than the way I put it.

------
jaabe
I don’t know a single manager or leading figure in management who isn’t
utilizing LinkedIn. It’s used for recruitment, idea-sharing, networking,
following and genuine discussion.

I fully understand how that can go unnoticed, because I didn’t notice for a
long while. Before I was invited to help formulate national standards on
enterprise architecture I rarely used LinkedIn. It’s not where developers
network, not by a long shot. But I entered these multi-municipal networks, and
through that work I was exposed to the greater sum of LinkedIn.

It’s not an understatement to say that it’s a platform you can’t ignore if you
work with any sort of management, and project/change-management applies to
this. Today it’s the only social network I have installed on my phone,
precisely for this reason.

On my morning commute this morning I learned about a new AI project in our
neighbouring municipality as an example of just how useful it is. I probably
would have heard about it eventually at one of the yearly events the project
owner and I both attend, but now I heard about it in time to enter the project
with them.

This is anecdotal of course and maybe this is a Danish thing, maybe it’s even
more profound in our public sector, but I think LinkedIn is rather valuable
and increasingly so.

~~~
partiallypro
Absolutely true, casual users don't realize how valuable LinkedIn is for
recruiting and sales in general. Once Microsoft is able to push a real CRM
competitor to Salesforce and have it integrate with their other cloud
offerings like LinkedIn...it's going to be quite something. I don't think
anyone will be able to compete with it, if I'm being honest. The blog
comically says this will lead to "monopoly" status, and I don't see how.

The blog post says all this integration is never going to happen, but I don't
know if they have ever worked for a large corporation or not...but it takes a
while to get the wheels spinning especially after an acquisition. Anyone that
thinks LinkedIn was a dumb purchase by Microsoft does so at their own peril.

~~~
porker
> Once Microsoft is able to push a real CRM competitor to Salesforce

Given how Salesforce is squeezing every last cent out of users (new or long-
time) that day can't come soon enough.

I like Salesforce (the product) and enjoy working with it more than I ever
enjoyed Dynamics CRM, but their price hikes are getting too much for customers
to stomach.

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d--b
Wow. It's the first time I see a professional chart that triggers such a
strong optical illusion:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r_I_go-Ei2NmUndXx...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*r_I_go-Ei2NmUndXxD3Ybg.png)

Is the zero axis horizontal?

~~~
majewsky
According to KRuler, it is.

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AznHisoka
Linkedin will still remain valuable in the recruiting industry. I hate it, but
I've decided to keep my profile because it'll raise a red flag to potential
employers when they see I'm not in it.

But as for everything else, most people are consumers. They consume content -
whether it's cat photos, videos, news, etc. Linkedin offers none of that.
People just go there when they need a job. So I don't see how they can
increase engagement in a platform where 99% of people in the world just want
to consume.

~~~
mr_custard
> I've decided to keep my profile because it'll raise a red flag to potential
> employers when they see I'm not in it

Really? Do you think people base such impressions upon solid logic, or is it
simply some sort of employer groupthink?

I like to think that potential employers will respect my decision to avoid the
vacuous LinkedIn crazy town, rather than mark me down for it.

Depends who's hiring I guess. If I'm the one doing the hiring, then not being
on LinkedIn certainly makes a positive impression upon me :-)

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> If I'm the one doing the hiring, then not being on LinkedIn certainly makes
> a positive impression upon me :-)

Isn't it kind of the same sort of thing as "wearing pants to a job interview"
now? Just part of the expected decorum for functioning as a professional? I
understand it can be a bit of a crazy town, but there's a difference between
"being on there" and "putting up inspirational quotes at 15 minute intervals".

~~~
mr_custard
You may well be right. That's a good point about not having to engage heavily
with it. Most other people in this thread seem to be indicating that this is
how it is (wearing pants is required), and that I'm a no-pants outlier.

If I ever get within a sniff of being near the breadline, then of course I
shouldn't rule out re-joining LinkedIn, in order to protect myself from
destitution, but things are okay for me right now.

I originally left because LinkedIn triggered my "3 strikes and you're out"
policy on spam and sneaky dark pattern preferences UI. Have they improved
their behaviour in that area?

Oh, they exposed my password to the internet and they also stole all my Google
contacts in the early days (2009?) without my permission. Nasty stuff.

I'm also worried about exposing too much personal history in terms of identity
theft. The less data out there, the better (?).

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I mean, if you're having success as a no-pants outlier, you do you, live that
dream. Yeah, they haven't been great (spam, passwords, contact hijacking), but
I just see it as the cost of working.

~~~
mr_custard
> I just see it as the cost of working

I sincerely mean this without any snark or sarcasm: You've given me something
to think about. Thanks!

 _Goes to look for pants..._

------
forgotAgain
Hmm,

Fall behind in search, spend billions on Bing.

Fall behind in mobile, spend billions on Nokia.

Fall behind in social media, spend billions on LinkedIn.

Hmm, so what was that definition of insanity again?

~~~
chiefalchemist
All true. Yet somehow, as of today, they're still relevant. Perhaps not insane
but certainly somewhat of a surprise.

p.s. Given what happened with the iPod / iTunes being behind isn't always a
bad thing.

~~~
cptskippy
> Given what happened with the iPod / iTunes being behind isn't always a bad
> thing.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. When the iPod and then iTunes entered
the scene, the MP3 player market was very small and immature. The product they
put forth was untouchable because it didn't address one or two gripes with MP3
players of the time, it addressed almost all of them. The failed Microsoft
products all entered mature markets with very strong incumbents.

When the iPod arrived on the scene it was half the size of the Creative HDD
based MP3 players that here hot shit at the time and wasn't trying to look
like futuristic discman. It featured a high speed interface (Firewire) so it
didn't take weeks to load your music. The interface actually helped you
quickly browse your gigabytes of sound files unlike everyone else whose UIs
were d-pad based nightmares that made browsing more than a few hundred MP3s a
hassle. It had a rechargeable battery that lasted longer than any other player
of which most were still using AA as power. The most compelling alternative to
the iPod was probably the iRiver H1xx series and it didn't arrive until 2
years later and still had a horribly crippled UI but equally high price.

All the incumbent tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and Google
entered the markets they dominate when those markets were very immature and
relatively new. Their products had multiple advantages over the competition,
if any, and quickly captured the market before anyone realized what happened.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Fair? Perhaps not line for line. But it's not important at that level of
detail.

My point is, I think if you asked most people "Who invented the MP3 player?"
they'd say Apple. That's just not the case. Refined it? Yes, obviously. But
they certainly weren't first.

Long to short, execution matters. There a tons of ideas sitting in the idea
gravy yard, not because they were bad ideas, but because they were executed
badly.

~~~
cptskippy
The comparison is completely invalid. If Apple was entering a mature market
with an incumbent MP3 player that was comparable to the iPod or even better,
then Apple would have had an uphill battle. They didn't. They entered a market
with clearly the best device by a fair margin and people flocked to it.

The Search, Social Network, and Mobile OS markets were very mature when
Microsoft entered market and the products they offered weren't discernably
better let alone substantially better.

~~~
chiefalchemist
For the record, it's because of Apple that you can say the MP3 player market
was not yet mature.

Regardless, my point - which might be different than your point - is first
isn't always best; and that Apple's reputation as a ground-breaker can be, at
times, overstated.

------
ChefboyOG
I, and many people it seems, agree with several of the criticisms—LinkedIn ads
are terrible, LI's core product is not enjoyable as a user, and the gaggle of
branded apps are an absolute clusterfuck.

However, the piece gets sloppy when the author starts speculating that Office
365's growth will lead to antitrust suits.

------
intopieces
To succeed, Microsoft needs to make LinkedIn the anti-Facebook in terms of
content, usefulness and trust. So far, this does not seem to be the case. I
see fake profiles, click bait, flamewars, and ever-present recruiter spam.

It isn't Microsoft's fault, per se. It's a hard problem.

~~~
webdood90
It's amazing how bad the content has become. It feels the same as Facebook, if
not worse. Sometimes I'll log on just to "people watch", but that's about the
extent of my usage.

~~~
intopieces
Yes, my naive assumption was that if people presented their real names and
their jobs in the same place, the discussion would be more civil — aren’t we
in the era where people lose their jobs for Twitter rants? - but the negative
content persists to the point that people are making memes(!) to push the idea
of making LinkedIn more civil. Strange times.

------
klik99
What about the value of the data? For a B2B company like MS, seems to me that
the goodwill would really be worth that much if it generates future
intangibles (useful data). I still see almost every professional with a
linkedin account, even if nobody uses it. Imagine what you can infer about
what projects other companies are working on just by the social graph. To
explain what this article was complaining about, that doesn't give much
incentive to make LinkedIn better.

Another reason why we need more itemization on intangibles in public
filings...

~~~
gwbas1c
The internet needs a single sign-on. Perhaps that's why Microsoft bought
LinkedIn?

~~~
adrianN
The Internet needs no such thing. The possibility to have different personas
in different parts of the Internet is one of its best features.

------
kylej762
This article makes a lot of good points about the acquisition of LinkedIn.
Such as, the ultimate play of LinkedIn user integration into the Microsoft
suite as the billion dollar idea for Micrsoft. However, near the end, the
author points our a painfully obvious contradiction of his knowledge on
Linkedin by saying, _" there is no transparency as to how LinkedIn's revenue
has grown..."_ While I understand the Facebook comparison, I believe it to be
a little off base. LinkedIn has two distinct business lines, advertising (like
Facebook) and a B2B recruiting software platform.

On the advertising front, I could not agree more with the article. Working in
the B2B marketing space for a while, we completely cut LinkedIn ads due to
poor reach of our defined target audience. Working in the fintech space, we
targeted the appropriate persona, yet came away with hundreds of likes from
irrelevant professions. Coupled with the price, we left almost immediately.

However, I believe that LinkedIn is expanding on a B2B play. Selling
recruiting solutions. LinkedIn is calling them "Talent Solutions." In October,
LinkedIn purchased Glint, based out of the bay area [1]. Glint focuses
primarily on B2B HR solutions, using surveys and AI to comprehend employee
engagement and satisfaction. With LinkedIn's talent solution + Glint's HR
solution, LinkedIn, and Microsoft, is making a horizontal play onto the HR
landscape.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-
employee...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee-
engagement-and-retention-platform-glint/)

~~~
gHosts
> Selling recruiting solutions

Sadly the "Jobs you might be interested in..." from linkedin are, despite
knowing quite a bit about what my skills are.... almost always completely
irrelevant.

ie. They have the data... they are mind blowingly incompetent at using it.

------
mattnewport
I can't see LinkedIn ever having the kind of engagement Facebook gets but it
also seems harder to leave completely than Facebook. When I decided to stop
using Facebook it was fairly easy and had little to no impact on my life.
Though I don't really like the experience of using LinkedIn it's harder to
avoid as I'm often asked to look at profile of job candidates there for work
and I imagine if I'm ever looking for work in the future my profile will need
to be updated as part of the job search.

------
skilled
I just don't get any social signals from LinkedIn's UI. Whenever I open the
homepage I immediately look away from the news feed as it is utter garbage.
The same goes for groups.

I think there is some potential to make LinkedIn work, but it has to start
with a thoughtful redesign. Of course, the right way would be that users
themselves communicate rather than having the design do it for you. But at
this point the platform has dug itself in too deep of a ditch.

------
framersqool
LinkedIn represents in spectacular fashion how the internet runs primarily on
wide-eyed, childlike gullibility: anybody can claim to be whoever or whatever
they choose to portray themselves as, and no one the wiser. During my time
using LI a few years back I found it occasionally a venue for some halfway
decent discussions, usually on topics having precious little to do with
business, management, recruiting etc, but its focus on matters of business was
laughable. The "INfluencers Program" was little more than a bully pulpit for
self-important yuppies to work their personal brands, and the way some of
these vacuous outbursts passing as articles by their so-called "INfluencers"
would be boasting tens of thousands of views within hours of posting made it
look like a conspicuous pay-to-play scam with authors paying for artificial
read stats to elevate their own profiles. Meanwhile, I encountered so many
scammers and spammers obviously hiding behind false identities as to make it a
rival for twitter in terms of its lowlife untrustworthiness as a serious means
to make contacts for serious purposes. Probably these comments here trumpeting
its legitimacy as a corporate recruiting and networking tool are written by LI
employees or on contract by ghostwriters, because you could stand on a street
corner with a handmade sign saying "I Am Someone Important, Honest" and you'd
be making a more credible representation of yourself than anyone with the
sense God gave geese could possibly see LinkedIn as being useful for.

------
_sword
This is a historical analysis that’s a couple years out of date. Under
Microsoft, LinkedIn revenues have re-accelerated growth to 33% Y/Y in the most
recent quarter vs. LinkedIn decelerating substantially to ~20’s % Y/Y growth
independently. We’re about at the point where Microsoft expected LinkedIn to
become earnings accretive as well, though that’s more difficult to tease out
from numbers.

------
drivingmenuts
Linked in is a great network for recruiters, if you're recruiting other
recruiters.

For people who actually do a real job, not so much.

------
pjc50
LinkedIn's continuing existence is a good argument that decentralisation is
harder than people think. To a large extent it's just competing with "job
boards" and "CVs", but it adds just enough value as an intermediary that it's
persisted.

------
mobilemidget
"Every time this LinkedIn commercial pops up on YouTube I am reminded of how
low the company has fallen to."

I recently thought the same when facebook started advertising (to me at least)
on silly mobile game (the ads those games show)

~~~
ForHackernews
Wait, they're advertising Facebook itself? Like "Sign up for this new social
network...it's called Facebook!"

~~~
nkrisc
After the whole Cambridge Analytica thing I even saw physical facebook ads on
the train, talking about how they weren't creepy and fake news is bad. It was
strange to see.

~~~
pirocks
I'm still seeing these on the underground.

~~~
nkrisc
They were all over the L in Chicago, but I haven't seen them for quite some
time. Though I think Facebook and Zuckerberg in particular might have an even
worse image over there than they do here.

