This week Microsoft paid a reported $7.5 billion for GitHub, the world’s largest pool of tech talent on the internet. This makes Microsoft the owner of the top two professional networks, once you throw in LinkedIn into the mix too.
Here are some immediate deductions that can be gathered:
Some will benefit from the acquisition…
- Most GitHub users aren’t on LinkedIn, or flat out dislike LinkedIn, plus there’s not a lot of overlap in talent that can be accessed via both sites.
- Many open-source developers aren’t happy about Microsoft aquiring GitHub, so that’s an opening. Dice could approach the top 50-100 GitHubbers and incentivise them to transfer to Dice and build a competitive product to GitHub.
- Stack Overflow. The equivalent opportunity that now exists for Dice also exists for Stack Overflow. The value of the company should’ have increased significantly after the GitHub acquisition.
But some will also lose out…
- Recruit Holdings.which owns Indeed and just bought Glassdoor for $1.2 billion, now looks feeble in light of the kind of stores Microsoft can throw around. The mountain Indeed has been climbing since Google for Jobs arrived just keeps getting higher.
- Sourcing tech.The ability for solutions to scrape data from sites like LinkedIn and GitHub threatens even more now if the doors to both LinkedIn and GitHub close to these solutions.
- It lost to Facebook when it came to social networking. It lost to LinkedIn, and thus Microsoft, on the professional networking. Now Google loses to rival Microsoft on the GitHub deal.
Post-acquisition, GitHub will have new resources to progress its service and attract more customers. Job postings and messaging services should be built in eventually, making it simpler to connect with talent. LinkedIn might even become the centre for all that activity.
On the other hand, Microsoft has great pricing power now it owns both LinkedIn and GitHub. Therefore, we most certainly are going to have to pay more to have the privilege of using Microsoft.
Read the original article here.
