The big story#DeleteLinkedIn Before you dial up a quick search, no, LinkedIn isn’t currently caught in a scandal, but does a product need to have a deeply toxic culture, corrupt democracy or have an ICE contract for you to boycott it? Can’t the product itself just be bad? I’ve thought about writing this for a long time because LinkedIn does serve some purposes, but it’s not a professional network, for the lay user it’s not much of anything. It’s built for recruiters and salespeople, and, yeah, I’m sure they will have plenty of great things to say about the doors that have been opened to them, but what about the employed consumers who value professional development and have been convinced that a LinkedIn account is a necessity? Facebook has taught consumers that our data is the price to use their services, but at least we get a little something out of that deal. LinkedIn is just a CRM where the customers all populate their own cells of the spreadsheet. It gives users spam and pop-ups that seem designed to help them find where the notifications settings on their phones are.
LinkedIn has been remarkably unambitious for a long time. The company is trying to make money and that’s chill; they’re trying to live up to Microsoft’s expectations by making obvious choices and I’d imagine it’s awfully hard to do that. Enterprise software lives in an eternal cycle of bundling and unbundling and LinkedIn is long overdue for some startups to come unbundle it. It can keep recruiting, sales and the millions of hallowed-out users profiles, but there’s so much potential dying on the LinkedIn vine. Investors have raved about the “consumerization of enterprise,” or bringing consumer-like products deeper into the workplace. There has also been a ton of chatter about startups building bespoke communities focused on tighter verticals. These two trends should lead to some great professional development products, and I’m sure there already are plenty entrepreneurs building solutions that will pop up in my inbox or the comments. There’s nearly endless potential for niche professional networks to flourish, actually innovate and create connections. LinkedIn is what happens when network effects congeal. It has this data that could be used to create so many good worker-facing products, instead the company has monetized itself by going out of its way to obfuscate this data for the majority of its users. I have truly limited faith in LinkedIn turning itself around so maybe it’s time we all walk away from this idea that it has so much untapped potential and we just give up on it to search out some more focused products that have a few users and meet a few needs. Please reach out to me on email (lucas @ techcrunch dot com) or on Twitter ( @lucasmtny) if you’re building something cool here.
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