Microsoft sells Slideshare: Wait - Microsoft owned Slideshare?

TechCrunch reports that Slideshare has been purchased by Scribd, who will take over operation on September 24.

Slideshare and Scribd both started as document sharing services, but Scribd eventually diverged to ebook and audiobook hosting.

“The two products always had kind of similar missions,” said Scribd CEO Trip Adler. “The difference was, [SlideShare] focused on more on PowerPoint presentations and business users, while we focused more on PDFs and Word docs and long-form written content, more on the general consumer.”

Along the way, SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and LinkedIn itself was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, which explain why today it is Microsoft who is selling Slideshare.

It is fairly common to come across a document shared on Slideshare when using the internet, but nothing about the website gave a clue that it had any connection with Microsoft.

LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering Chris Pruett, however, argues that the company did a lot to bring Slideshare and LinkedIn closer together, saying:

LinkedIn acquired SlideShare in May 2012 at a time when it was becoming clear that professionals were using LinkedIn for more than making professional connections. Over the last eight years, the SlideShare team, product, and community has helped shape the content experience on LinkedIn. We’ve incorporated the ability to upload, share, and discuss documents on LinkedIn.

It appears it was Microsoft who approached Scribd with the offer and it appears all of Slideshare’s employee’s will be made redundant following the deal, with Scribd staff taking over all operations.

The price of the deal is undisclosed.