Agree with your main point.
To keep this in perspective, it's $4 a share, so the downside risk of this transaction is pretty clear. After many years of treading water living off their legacy product lines what I had heard is they are doing quite well in newer areas like cloud computing. The premium may be 50% but it's zero premium on LNKD in price only a few months ago.
Yes, it's a huge gamble but maybe not so much for them. What I'm saying is all we hear about on hear is "experts" criticizing everything about companies and deals they know very little about. They are not all failures, as my examples of GOOG, FB, and more recently AMZN illustrate. I'm being realistic, I cannot fathom why FB is doing so well but perhaps the initial forecasts about the power of the Internet in the 1990s are coming true now, just not exactly as people thought, and 10+ years later then people thought. My observation is giants in the industry are doing well, and smaller players not so well.