According to LinkedIn, Scribd will take over operations of SlideShare on September 24. Scribd CEO, Trip Adler, stated that SlideShare will continue to operate as a standalone service, separate from Scribd, and that he’s hopeful it will continue to be well-integrated with LinkedIn.
“Nothing will change in the initial months,” Adler said. “We have a lot of experience with a product like this…We’re in a good position make SlideShare successful.”
We have all experienced the pain of a platform change, think Google+ or Microsoft 2016, so time will tell whether or not Mr. Adler is able to keep his word; although, his quote, “…in the initial months” is cause for concern.
I have used slideshare for a long time and have saved multiple presentations and documents over the years. It is a great platform for archiving professional work content and I have used it to link back to .pdfs quite a bit over the years. It has always been a free tool and I have recommended it to my clients and peers. Having a free platform in the cloud that hosts all of my presentations and PR examples has been great. I hope it doesn’t become a pay to play platform, but if it does, I’m sure I can host my documents on Google Drive or Apple.
Scribd is something different and plans to be world’s largest digital library. Having access to others presentations has also been very helpful over the years so I hope it continues!