Nadella is very bright and has a clear vision of where he wants to take his company.
Buying LinkedIn was clearly fitting his strategy. I had read both CEO letters to their employees and they revealed a lot.
The most important piece was in the LinkedIn letter, talking about the emerging displacement of many and many workers, due to machine learning (or automation, robotization, whatever you want to call it). Those people will be looking for jobs.
- Microsoft focuses on cloud.
- Microsoft focuses on enterprise.
- Microsoft doesn't have a major social network footprint.
- Chrome OS (with Google Docs) gaining access to Android apps, could spell serious trouble for Office and Windows in enterprise.
Imagine LinkedIn as a framework the enterprise could buy as a service and deploy inside, intranet on steroids. You package of Azure, Office, OneDrive, Skype for business, and all other services.... makes perfect sense...
If that did not convince you, what about the warchest of data LinkedIn is sitting on? All the connections, people skills listed in user profiles, or what job they are looking for? That is like a spyglass other companies would give up a leg for...to see where the enterprise is heading.
I think this was a brilliant acquisition. Though pricey.