You might have noticed in the news just recently that Microsoft and LinkedIn announced they have entered into an agreement under which Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn for an all cash transaction of $26.2 Billion.
Whilst some people are scratching their heads at the amount paid, some others are explaining the underlying reasons, including quite possibly the largest database of connected professionals on the planet. Whether you agree the content has the depth of content as other sites, there’s no denying there is certainly a lot of business related content, much to the exclusion of a lot of other things many people would rather not see.
So where will Microsoft take LinkedIn in the future. Certainly you can expect LinkedIn to have connectivity to other Microsoft products like Skype, email and enterprise products.
But we might also see some disruption head our way.
As some articles mentioned late last year, LinkedIn Just Made a Savvy Business Move and Nobody Noticed.
Without much fanfare, LinkedIn quietly jumped into the ever-expanding “freelancer-for-hire” marketplace. Whilst it might be early days for the new ProFinder service, it’s said to be quickly gaining momentum.
And if you weren’t already looking over your shoulder to see whether Gumtree or Airtasker services were eating into your compliance margins, you were probably regularly monitoring freelancer, ServiceSeeking, Ozlance, Upwork, Guru, Simply hired and a dozen other freelance websites.
So we’ve noticed quite a few independent “Freelance” outsourcers putting their services up online, which means that it’s likely that you are training your replacements if you are using ad hoc services or hiring full time resources where you hire and train the resources as if they are your own.
It will be interesting to see where Microsoft/LinkedIn take their ProFinder initiative, but we can be certain that LinkedIn wouldn’t have embarked upon this new service unless there were supply and demand.
And probably we can draw the other conclusion that “Change is a Constant” in the Professional World.
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