[feider]

", this is a great purchase."

You cant really say it's a great purchase without mentioning the price, which you didn't. I haven't done any deep analysis but my gut feeling says that 26.2B for stopping Linkedin spam is not worth it.

[exelius]

The price is high, but strategically Microsoft doesn't have a lot of options for new markets, and Microsoft's current markets are in decline so it needs to find new markets in order to grow. This purchase opens a huge market to them in the form of HR services, and that could easily turn into a $5-10 billion a year product for Microsoft within a decade. Everyone in the tech industry (MS included) is sitting on huge piles of cash right now, so valuations are high everywhere. It's a bit of a bubble, but it's more of a bubble driven by a lack of strong acquisition targets.

Nadella has finally given up chasing the consumer market -- this is a very good thing if you're a Microsoft shareholder. The company has never done well with consumers; Xbox is their lone success, and it took them a decade and a half to become profitable (and even then, it's tiny compared to their business products). The strength of the company is their enterprise sales organization, which they can use to drive new products to their existing customers. Google, Apple and Amazon don't have that; but Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, etc. do. Focusing on that is their only way to grow at this point.