[cjbgkagh]

Microsoft wanted it to be a social network because they couldn’t buy Facebook. They did buy Yammer though.

A lot of the bad policies were implemented when getting LinkedIn ready for sale to boost the short term gains and maximize the sale price, once sold it was hard to reverse the policies in order to maintain a healthy market long term. They do kinda have a mini-monopoly / cornered market so they were able to milk that for money.

[siva7]

Yammer was probably one of the most bizarre m&a stories ever.

[Spooky23]

The same reason there’s probably some dude pitching adding AI to notepad. Fad and fashion.

In the last 20 years “peer to peer”, “Uber for X”, “gamification” and now of course “AI” were the must have tech memes. Back in the day O’Reilly had a conference dedicated to the revolution of… XML.

Social was just another one. Now, even the social companies are kinda moving past social. It’s more about hoarding attention. But when Microsoft was shoveling money at Gartner, we had guys coming in dropping books about how the social enterprise would revolutionize business.

[cyanydeez]

eh, that guy who pitched AI for Notepad was a product of M$lop push for AI everywhere. No one seriously though it needed AI, but if they're trolling for AI pitches, of course that's an easy target, it's already text based. GUI stuff is hard, but raw text?

[Spooky23]

I actually didn’t know that was a thing. I was trying to cook up something quick and absurd. Truth is stranger than fiction!