The business press' attention today is on the $26B acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft. It makes a lot of sense on paper: LI adds a missing piece to the Office/Cloud strategy: an internet persona which many business users care about.
Hopefully it does not go the way of Skype or Nokia.
That being said, I've always been an advocate of three different acquisitions surrounding LinkedIn: it buying Quora.com, GlassDoor, and StackOverflow.
LinkedIn is really good at networking, essentially replacing the business card, and has a great set of recruitment tools, which it monetises to good effect.
But from my perspective as both an employer and (past) jobseeker, LinkedIn's Achilles heel is Reputation. Recommendations have tepid value while Skill Endorsements are worthless at best, and spammy at their worst.
GlassDoor addresses Employer reputation, while Quora and StackOverflow are a much more sensible approach to individual reputations than Recommendations. If I'm hiring a Director of Marketing tomorrow, I'd feel far more assured measuring a candidate for fit reading through a few dozen of their Quora posts about marketing topics than I would speaking to a candidate-nominated reference.
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