Microsoft buys LinkedIn for a whopping $26.2 billion!!

Microsoft has made its most ambitious move in years to reassert itself in a technology market it once dominated.

The software giant said Monday morning that it would acquire LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion cash deal. The acquisition, by far the largest in Microsoft’s history, unites two companies in different businesses: one a big maker of software tools, the other the largest business-oriented social networking site, with more than 400 million members globally.

The deal is Microsoft’s biggest bet yet that the traditional software business is shifting quickly to cloud computing, a model in which customers rent software and other services delivered over the internet. While LinkedIn does not have the household name of Facebook, a much larger and more lucrative social network, it is the most widely used site for people to advertise their professional skills and work history.

It is also further evidence that Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, sees the company’s future further and further removed from the PC software that once helped the company’s co-founder Bill Gates turn Microsoft into the world’s most valuable company.

Though they operate in different businesses, Microsoft and LinkedIn make most of their money by catering to professionals. Executives involved in the deal said that the common thread prompted the acquisition.

“This deal is all about bringing together the professional cloud and professional network,” Mr. Nadella said in a telephone interview.

So valuable is the data that recruiters spend thousands of dollars a month to use it to fill job openings.

“They know the interconnections of the business world,” said Brian Blau, an analyst at Gartner, a technology research firm. “That could really benefit Microsoft from a sales standpoint.”

Microsoft has bought its way into new businesses before, though most of its largest deals have not turned out well. In 2014, it paid nearly $9.4 billion for the smartphone operations of Nokia and some years earlier spent more than $6 billion for aQuantive, an internet advertising company, but ended up writing off most of the value of those deals after they performed poorly.