EITHER:

• they are incompetent, & not understanding Branding, at all ( read the books of Al Ries on Branding, Marketing, Focus, etc, and that book on Focus is the core of why LinkedIn is now hosed )

XOR:

• somebody in upper-management there is a trojan, the same as Steve Ballmer got a trojan into Nokia, as a means of harvesting all sorts of patent-rights while destroying Nokia ( what Citadel & Boston Consulting Group did to Sears is the same, except that Citadel was shorting it, instead of getting a sea of patent-licenses )

( well, OK, the combination of both is actually-possible, but less-likely? )

In either case, what they're doing, besides Microsofting the joint, ( the verb "to Microsoft" means to highjack/trojan/enshittify/rot-all-value-from a company through partial/total ownership ), is they are making-certain that whatever competitor should appear on the horizon, Microsoft is stacking-odds FOR that competitor, against LinkedIn.

Same as how MySpace made certain that people disliked it enough to suddenly-jump-ship when Facebook came around..

Anti-strategy.

CORE Anti-strategy.

We evidently haven't figured-out how to test for strategic intelligence, yet, as it obviously has nothing, whatsoever, to do with SAT++.

LinkedIn has become business-casual facebook.

Already seeing many using it as a Tumblr/Twitter replacement where they share shower thoughts unprompted. It's really odd.

LinkedIn reminds me of that scene in Men in Black where they discover a weird little society living inside a locker. But instead of a locker, it's a job board.

Seeing how some users already interpret is as a dating app ... they're not the only ones