The $26.2bn Microsoft paid for business-orientated social networking site LinkedIn is its largest purchase ever. It is the equivalent of buying Nokia (worth $7.9bn) 3.3 times, or Skype ($8.5bn) three times. Unsurprisingly, it has the tech industry in a flutter.The pressing question has been this: was LinkedIn worth this astronomical price, keeping in mind that Microsoft has a habit of overpaying for companies, only to write down their value later? And has Microsoft made yet another ill-advised attempt at entering a field (social media) it knows nothing about and where it has no foothold, as it did when it attempted to get into mobile by purchasing Nokia in 2014? Two years later, the largest maker of software wrote off most of Nokia’s value ($7.6bn).This is similar to what Microsoft was forced to do with its other “notable” acquisition, that of aQuantive, a marketing and advising company it bought in 2007 for $6.3bn. In 2012, it wrote off almost the entire value of that acquisition.T...
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