In my experience, whether we’re talking about a gigantic acquisition like our deal to purchase the social network LinkedIn or smaller acquisitions like those of app developers Xamarin, Acompli, and MileIQ, the acquisitions that succeed generally start as partnerships born out of careful analysis of customer needs. That was the case with LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in 2016 for $26 billion, one of the largest such deals in history. For more than six years, Microsoft and LinkedIn worked together to enable our one billion users and their nearly half-a-billion members—the Venn diagram of our
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