Doing Fewer Things Better

This year, LinkedIn is committing to the concept of focus more than ever. We are making large, long-term investments on a few big bets, and in order to ensure their success, we need to concentrate on fewer things. Our goal is to provide our members with seamless experiences – not just individual products – that will help them become more productive and successful professionals. With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at our product offerings and made the decision to shut down some services.

We are shutting down LinkedIn Intro as of March 7, 2014. Intro was launched last year to bring the power of LinkedIn to your email inbox on your iPhone. While Intro is going away, we will continue to work on bringing the power of LinkedIn to wherever our members work. Email, where the average professional spends more than a quarter of their time, is one of those places, so we’ll continue to look for ways to bring this kind of functionality to our members through existing partnerships. Users of Intro will be able to uninstall it between now and March 7 and switch back to their previous mail accounts. Members can continue to use Rapportive, which brings the power of LinkedIn to Gmail.

We are also shutting down Slidecast, a service that enables SlideShare members to upload presentations with audio, on April 30, 2014. Slidecast users will be able to download their Slidecasts until April 30 and can continue to share the non-audio portions of their presentations with their network on SlideShare.net. The SlideShare team will continue to focus on building new products and improving our existing experiences to make our products even better for our members.

We have also decided to eliminate support for the LinkedIn iPad app on iOS versions older than 6.0 as of February 18, 2014. This follows our decision to stop supporting the LinkedIn mobile app for iOS versions older than 6.0 and Android versions older than 3.0 late last year. We encourage our members to download the latest app versions from the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

This increased focus will allow us to commit more resources toward fewer products and continue to deliver even better experiences for our members.

by Deep Nishar via Official Blog