Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperrail | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus is also just north of the 101 Shoreline Blvd exit - currently, it and LinkedIn HQ are only about 1 mile apart, possibly within walking distance. If and when this deal goes through, this won't be the case anymore, and so LinkedIn will be isolated from other Microsoft offices.

I guess it is too early for LinkedIn to be making decisions as part of Microsoft...

View on HN

Perhaps Microsoft intends for LinkedIn to operate more or less independently? I haven't really been following the acquisition.

There has not been much announced in way of what Microsoft intends to do with LinkedIn, so you haven't missed much. The acquisition hasn't gone through yet.

I could see the whole operation moving over near LinkedIn's new digs near Maude...Microsoft's "campus" off of Shoreline is definitely "meh". Microsoft seems to be investing elsewhere for new digs anyway; they have a new building on the Sunnyvale side of Moffett.

It looks like Microsoft is looking to expand in Mountain View a little:

http://www.mountainview.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?...

See page 5.

>LinkedIn to operate more or less independently

So it can continue to lose money by itself? Is it in MS style to make pure investments like this, at this scale?

How big is Microsoft's presence in SV? Could they reasonably move along with LinkedIn at some point?

Not very big at the moment. They would never relocate from Redmond but a satellite office (from my naive uninformed perspective) isn't out of the question.

They already have a satellite office in that area of Mountain View of a few buildings.

Hence the "not very big." If they didn't have a couple buildings my response would be "non-existent."

They have 4 office buildings and one cafeteria/commons building on that campus - space for around 1500 employees.

It's worth noting that Microsoft's bay area presence is already pretty fragmented, though. They have some more office space a couple exits down 101 in Sunnyvale (not walkable to the MV campus at all), a Skype office in Palo Alto, Yammer in SF, etc. They've also announced plans to renovate and expand the Mountain View campus: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/01/21/microsoft...

I don't know the exact numbers, but when I left Microsoft a couple of years ago, the following product divisions were among those based in the 6 buildings of the Mountain View SVC (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Microsoft+SVC+Building+1/@... ):

- Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail)

- Parts of Office for Mac OS X and iOS

- Xbox hardware and accessories (Xbox software was in Redmond)

- Windows Phone online services

- Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (but that was closed in the first round of layoffs several months after I left)

SVC was originally built for Hotmail and WebTV (remember that?).

Microsoft also had separate offices in Sunnyvale (in the big cluster of relative skyscrapers just south of Moffett Field), which I believe were mostly folks who came from Skype and/or Nokia.

PowerPoint, for all platforms (not just OS X and iOS) is developed at that office too. PowerPoint has actually been in the bay area since it was acquired.

The Web TV stuff was sold to Ericcson a few years ago, and they moved to an office in San Jose at the end of 2015.

I think the Sunnyvale office was mostly teams working on Bing, as well as handful of smaller acquisitions.

Afaik (parts of) the Skype team is here.

There's a constellation of offices from various acquisitions as well.

there are roughly 3000 microsoft folks in the bay area. most are at the mountain view campus next to linkedin and moffett towers across the airstrip. but also a bunch in san francisco (yammer) and palo alto (skype).

LinkedIn's SV presence (they also have SF, NY etc) is a lot larger than MS's valley presence and MS could probably consolidate with the LI folks' future offices without problem.

O/T fun: my girlfriend worked for MS but got bored, so interviewed at Google and LinkedIn...by walking! Google offered to send a Tesla to bring her the two blocks to the interview but she thought it wouldn't be cool to be picked up in the work parking lot. She chose LinkedIn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com