Since co-founder and Executive Chairman Reid Hoffman initiated LinkedIn 13 years ago, the company has grown to claim 433 million members, including 105 million active monthly users.
LinkedIn has become a central place online for professionals to network and learn about job opportunities, making it enormously valuable for executive recruiters and giving it a trove of data that few other companies have.
About two-thirds of LinkedIn’s $3 billion in revenue comes from its talent-solutions division, which helps corporate recruiters identify job candidates.
Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s latest effort is to open new horizons for Microsoft’s Office Suite, as well as LinkedIn, both of which have saturated their markets, and generally bolster revenue and its competitive position.
Mr. Nadella said today’s work is split between tools workers use to get their jobs done and professional networks that connect workers. The engagement, he said, aims to weave those two pieces together.
For instance, connecting Office directly to LinkedIn could help attendees of meetings learn more about one another directly from invitations in their calendars.
Microsoft also sees opportunities in Lynda.com, a channel for training videos that LinkedIn bought for $1.5 billion last year. Microsoft will be able to offer Lynda’s videos inside its own software, such as Excel spreadsheets.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2016
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