LinkedIn Shopped Itself to Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, and Others ⇥ recode.net

All of the prospective buyers in this case seem to have one thing in common: they’re all interested in expanding their collection of user data. Google and Facebook aren’t interested in engineering talent that can presumably only be found at LinkedIn, but the company’s collection of data on over 430 million users must have been appealing. Microsoft — the eventual buyer — has, of late, been accelerating their own collection of user data, too.