The Endgame for LinkedIn Is Coming

Jack of all trades. LinkedIn had — and still has — multiple branded apps: Job Search, SlideShare, Learning, Recruiter, Sales Navigator and something call ‘Elevate”

Bad at integration and scaling. LinkedIn acquired many companies to introduce various services, but wasn’t so good at making them work.

Ads were expensive and user-unfriendly. Natalie Halimi, a marketer with 10 years of experience, wrote about LinkedIn ads back in July 2014. She used the headers “high CPC, poor dashboard, poor analysis” and concluded “ LinkedIn need to reassess their pricing strategy to provide better ROI for advertisers”.

Overvalued, full stop. Just before the plunge, LinkedIn shares were trading at 50x forward earnings. Twitter was at 30x, Facebook 34x and Google 21x. It was one of the most expensive stocks in tech.

When Microsoft introduced Office 365, it was to battle Google’s G Suite which appealed to smaller businesses with its cheaper pricing and cloud-based subscription model.

It is succeeding. According to a 2018 Bitglass survey, Office 365’s global market share has gone up to 56.3% from 7.7% in just four years. G Suite has stayed at about 25% since 2016.
LinkedIn’s employees were actually using G suite — the whole bag: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Docs, Sheets… — before the Microsoft acquisition.

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more on LinkedIn in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=linkedin