Work/Play/Career: LinkedIn Acquisition Gives Microsoft the "Third Screen" in Your Life

Like most everyone else I scratched my head when I read that Microsoft is buying LinkedIn...what the heck is a software vendor doing buying a business social networking firm? The answer: it's a brilliant move.

Yes, Microsoft started out as a software vendor. But in recent years, and even more so under Satya Nadella, Microsoft is evolving into a vendor of cloud-first, 'sticky,' high-value-add, differentiated business solutions..and LinkedIn fits perfectly into this strategy.

First came the various acquisitions that are now called "Dynamics": Business software & CRM/Marketing suites. Like Oracle, Microsoft moved from selling just infrastructure to offering core business solutions that are very hard to replace once they've been integrated into the fabric of a firm's financial operations...and that provide toe-holds for the firm's database, security, reporting, and analysis tools to become the standards across the firm ("well, we're already using SQL Server and SSRS in Finance, so why not use them over here, and over there?").

At about the same time came 'social connectors' for Microsoft Office: links to FaceBook, LinkedIn, and other Social Media platforms that turned boring old Outlook into a portal to our contacts' personal and work lives.

Then came Azure and Office 365: Microsoft embracing the cloud with open arms and forgoing up-front revenue for a scary-sounding subscription model. Microsoft wisely emphasized stickier, more differentiated offerings--Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)--rather than the more commoditized Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.

Office 365 started out with Office and SharePoint in the cloud: two application suites already used by millions of employees around the world. And they keep adding new features designed to make it every employee's 'go to' portal: Delve, an intelligent search tool; Yammer and Send, simple but powerful chat/collaboration tools; Power BI, an end-user analytics tool; Groups, simple collaboration spaces; Planner, a simple project management tool. Toss in OneDrive, for virtualizing files, and OneNote, for organizing informal and unstructured data, and you have a reason for keeping that window open your entire work day.

While all this business innovation was happening, Microsoft invested billions in the XBox platform, to capture your attention when you got home. I'm not a gaming expert so I can't really say whether the Xbox One and the XBox/Windows 10 integration were brilliant successes, but clearly they were designed to keep Microsoft front and center at home as much as at work...and to blur line lines between them a bit.

Which brings us to LinkedIn. Microsoft owns your attention at work, and owns it to some extent at home when you game. But what about the other parts of your life? The part where you create and enhance your 'personal brand' by blogging (Pulse); the part where you continue learning (Lynda); the part where you interact with peers, post your CV, look for better opportunities (LinkedIn).

It's one screen for work, one screen for play, and one screen for 'me'--and all three screens come from Microsoft.

The LinkedIn acquisition makes sense insofar as it extends Microsoft's reach across the learning, sharing, and striving of 400 million (or whatever) potential customers, most of whom are focused on business (theirs or their employer's) the entire time they're using LinkedIn.