Daily Tech Snippet: Friday, December 9

• Andreessen in hot water for texts he sent Zuckerberg: Facebook’s board was sued earlier this year, with investors alleging that their interests were not adequately represented when Zuckerberg was permitted to sell most of his shares and still retain voting control of the company. And now court filings uncovered by Bloomberg show that texts sent by board member Marc Andreessen are being used to suggest that he was protecting Zuckerberg instead of shareholders. Private messages sent during conference calls from Andreessen to Zuckerberg, such as “this line of argument is not helping” and “now we’re cooking with gas,” have given some investors the impression that he was coaching the CEO instead of negotiating with him. The board appointed a committee last year to represent investor concerns because the proposed stock sale could dilute their voting power. Andreessen was on the committee and has been accused of neglecting his fiduciary duties.

• Inmarsat switches to Arianespace for satellite launch after SpaceX delays: British satellite company Inmarsat will switch to using Arianespace from rival SpaceX to launch a new satellite to provide broadband connectivity to air passengers, it said on Thursday. The S-band satellite had been scheduled to launch with technology billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX but Inmarsat said setbacks to SpaceX's launch schedule prompted it to turn to Arianespace instead. Inmarsat said on Thursday that European-owned Arianespace will launch the S-band satellite in mid-2017. SpaceX has been forced to delay December rocket launches until January as an investigation continues into why one rocket burst into flames on September 1. SpaceX has a backlog of more than 70 missions for NASA and commercial customers, worth more than $10 billion.

• With LinkedIn, Microsoft Looks to Avoid Past Acquisition Busts: Microsoft announced on Thursday that it had completed its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the social network for professionals. There are ample reasons to be skeptical that the deal, the biggest by far in Microsoft’s history, will pay off.  First, the company has not had a great track record with this sort of thing. Two of Microsoft’s largest acquisitions — the digital advertising firm aQuantive and the mobile unit of Nokia — were disappointments that eventually led to the company writing off nearly the entire value of the deals, more than $13 billion in all.  Still, the Microsoft of 2016 is different from the unfocused giant of the past that lurched from deal to deal with wild-eyed ambitions of catching rivals like Google and Apple. It has a new chief executive who has made a series of smaller deals that have shown positive results. The company’s stock is trading at record highs. A key difference in the way Microsoft has approached the deal is the degree of independence it plans to give LinkedIn. It will not weave LinkedIn, which is based in Silicon Valley, into one of its existing product lines, nor will it treat it like a disconnected business. Mr. Weiner will remain LinkedIn’s chief executive. “Neither one of us is a Pollyanna,” said Mr. Weiner. “We both know that acquisition integrations are challenging.” A good model inside Microsoft is the company’s $2.5 billion purchase in 2014 of Mojang, the developer behind Minecraft, which has continued to grow under Microsoft’s ownership, retaining key employees along the way. Mr. Nadella and Mr. Weiner said they had also looked to Facebook’s success in acquiring companies like the photo-sharing service Instagram, while granting them autonomy. “I absolutely think of LinkedIn as our Instagram,” Mr. Nadella said. So determined was Mr. Nadella to get off on the right foot that he emailed an unusual request to Mr. Weiner a few days after the announcement of their deal in June. He asked Mr. Weiner to take the lead on an integration team responsible for merging their two companies, a responsibility that normally falls to an executive at the acquiring company. “I had to read it at least twice,” Mr. Weiner said. “I did a bit of a double take.”