Microsoft buys social network LinkedIn for $ 26.2 billion – Globo.com

Microsoft announced on Monday (13) the purchase of Linkedin, social network for professional contacts, for $ 26.2 billion.

The owner of the Windows agreed to pay US $ 196 per share of corporate networking site.

the current chief executive of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, will continue to lead the company and report to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. He and Reid Hoffman, chairman, co-founder and controlling shareholder, will help in the transition. The expectation is that the process is still closed this year.

LinkedIn will be incorporated into the Productivity segment and Process Business Microsoft.

the acquisition is one of the most expensive in the history of Microsoft, considering the nominal values ​​of businesses whose terms were announced. The largest transaction so far had been the purchase of Skype in 2011 for $ 8.5 billion. Then the Nokia shopping arise, for $ 7.18 billion in 2013; of aQuantive, at $ 6.4 billion in 2007; and Mojang, creators of “Minecraft” game, for $ 2.5 billion in 2014.

Microsoft’s track record with acquisitions has generated financial headache. The transaction aQuantive, internet advertising company, made to compete with Google earned the company the first loss in its history in 2012 – to balance the losses, the company had to record a writedown of $ 6.3 billion.

the second loss in history came in 2015 with another writedown, this time of $ 7.5 billion on behalf of Nokia.

LinkedIn
the social network has 433 million users worldwide and receives 105 million and visits per month. Use focuses on mobile devices 60% of the flow come from smartphones and tablets. According to the two companies, there are 7 million lists of active jobs on LinkedIn.

“The LinkedIn team created a fantastic business focused on connecting the world’s professionals,” Nadella said. “Together, we can accelerate the LinkedIn growth as well as the Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics, as we seek emponderar every individual and organization in the world.”

“In the past 13 years, we stand only to connect professionals and make them more productive and successful, “said Weinder. “Just as we change the way the world connects to an opportunity, this relationship as Microsoft and the combination of her cloud and LinkedIn gives us a chance to also change the way the world works.”

data Leakage and ‘was post-PC’
LinkedIn lives one moment, one hand tries to consolidate its relevance, and the other deals with the ghost leakage of personal data of their users back to haunt. A 2012 flaw allowed attackers succeeded in a package of 6.5 million access credentials. In May this year, however, this set of information on the Internet rose again, but this time much bigger. It contained 167 million combinations of login access and password.

The volume of credentials was sold on the Internet for prices that varied according to demand. The initial value was $ 2.2 billion.

The suspicion is that the exposure of these passwords is the main reason for a wave of social networking profiles invasion personalities like Mark Zuckerberg, president- executive of Facebook, and Keith Richards, Rolling Stones guitarist.

Since Microsoft tries to catch on Windows 10 as an operating system capable of performing common tasks to computers as mobile devices. Leader in computer software, this is the company’s initiative to enter the time in the “Post-PC Era”, opened with the advent of the smartphone and the growth of companies like Google.