This week, Andrew, Tosin and I discuss how the internet is legally free for all, but not for Gawker, the Microsoft buyout of LinkedIn, and all the latest from two huge tech industry events: Apple‘s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) and the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).
Nathaniel Popper for the new York Times:
"But Microsoft is breaking the corporate taboo on pot this week by announcing a partnership to begin offering software that tracks marijuana plants from “seed to sale,” as the pot industry puts it.
The software — a new product in Microsoft’s cloud computing business — is meant to help states that have legalized the medical or recreational use of marijuana keep tabs on sales and commerce, ensuring that they remain in the daylight of legality."
Between LinkedIn and this, Nadella is forging ahead by noticing new, different and exciting opportunities for Microsoft.
That's right, Microsoft ("MS") seems to have picked up $26 billion dollars.
Why? Well, aside from Cramer's musings about "cloud strategy" LinkedIN, a silicon valley based social network, focused on building and maintaining business relationships, and has a few key features that can help the Redmond technology giant:
It occurs to me that by using MS's Cloud services, mining LinkedIN data can lead MS to the inside track on innovative and even disruptive emerging companies. This would allow their strategy teams to identify opportunities for (1) lucrative partnerships and (2) promising investments. Despite the incredible cost of this acquisition,** such actions can lead MS to some very lucrative VC and strategic partnership concerns in the future, and that's very, very exciting.
MS has had some mixed success with recent, large acquisitions. While Skype (2011 for $8.5 billion) seems to be doing fine, Nokia (2013 for $7.2 billion) turned into a disaster, as did their earlier attempt at mobile, Danger (2008 for $1/2 billion). In the online ad services game, which LinkedIN ties to, MS has had pretty poor success. Their earlier push for a presence in this market took the form of a 2007, $6.3 billion acquisition of aQuantive, the parent company of digital ad agency Razorfish owned by Publicis Group and Atlas Solutions, an adserver now owned by Facebook. MS wasn't able to make the subsidiary work and took a $6.2 billion write down of the acquisition in 2007 before selling the pieces off to the above-mentioned companies.
The LinkedIN acquisition also allows something else-- an ability for MS to expand it's deterministic unique identifiers of online activity. While LinkedIN will remain independent for now, MS will certainly add the user data to its existing Microsoft Account user interaction data and perhaps eventually combine the two, following users from recreational activities like gaming on Xbox and home video streaming, to their workplace activities like using LinkedIN and MS office. This means less tracking by less accurate, probalistic tracking identifiers like browser cookies, wifi netowrks, IP address tracking.
We'll be watching this closely.
**looks like $2+ billion over the current LinkedIN market cap of $24+ billion.
Every single time I turn on my 2010 HP Envy 14, I'm assaulted by a huge pop-up telling me that I should join 110 million other users and upgrade my machine to Windows 10.
MS is aggressive -- too aggressive about forcing this older hardware to adopt their new software.
Case in point-- my 2010 HP Envy 14 doesn't want Windows 10. I know this because I popped Windows 10 on another older machine to see how well it does on older hardware. It's fine, but it's far from any sorta performance improvement.
Now I don't advocate that anyone interested in computing performance spend a lot of time on a 6 year old laptop. I'm looking to upgrade but frankly, the machine is more than adequate for classic gaming, writing and working on the web. That means that in its current state, as long as security updates still keep on coming, the Windows 7 system is a good thing for this computer-- especially when I think about passing it on to a child or someone else in need of a reliable, if not crazy fast machine.
So if you're like me, and want to save your windows 7 experience by stopping upgrade-focused pop-ups and stopping auto-upgrading, then check this site out.