Microsoft, the giant tech company made headlines yesterday when they announced that they have bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in cash! It made sense due to the fact that LinkedIn is all about connecting professionals and Microsoft has a foothold in the enterprise market.
Microsoft has bought companies before. They bought SwiftKey for $250 million and Skype for $8.5 billion dollars where the latter ended up being integrated it into Windows and in Office and you would think they would do this to another acquisition. Well, someone already imagined such a scenario and it looks like classic Microsoft.
This guy posted the obviously edited screenshot on a subreddit with the caption “I’m beta testing the new Microsoft LinkedIn interface.” In the visualization, you can see the classic LinkedIn menu bar where you see the first change: The search bar is now “powered” by Bing where you can Bing for people, jobs, companies and more. The next change is how he replaced the LinkedIn user interface with what seems to be a mixture of Microsoft Word 2010, Windows 10, Linked In and Office 2003 elements. Word 2010’s UI dominates the whole interface while the Windows 10 live tiles have been positioned to the right. Clippy was dragged to this (literally of course) in this visualization and you can remember the animated AI guide from Word 2003 days.
It is highly unlikely Microsoft would do this since they iterated that LinkedIn would retain its independence in this acquisition but it was funny to think how it would have turned out if the company decided to integrate its assets.
