I used to be pretty heavily anti-Microsoft. Too many of the decisions they made over the past twenty years were simply to benefit their entrenched positions and enterprise (re: highly controlled environment) clients. But with the introduction of Satya Nadella as CEO replacing Steve Balmer a new Microsoft was immediately born. They became flexible, innovative, daring and not tied to legacy decisions that hurt the broader technology ecosystem.
This is why today I’m fairly excited about Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn. Microsoft can never fully shed its enterprise legacy because that is a base that supports so much of everything they do. Get businesses to support a standard but make that standard flexible enough that regular employees like using it not just at the office but then take it home and make it cost effective enough that those not in business get value from it as well. That’s a great business model (although one that almost no one besides Microsoft can attempt).
LinkedIn is part of the enterprise now. It has a long way to grow but it has made itself a critical part to the job/reference/contact search process that it can’t help but get better. It’s not truly social media either which means Microsoft has a lot of different ways it can incorporate it into their suite of applications. Just imagine:
- MS Outlook pulling LinkedIn network connections for meetings. See your connection to someone directly as part of the agenda.
- Skype built into LinkedIn. What could be better than leveraging LinkedIn to make Skype a ubiquitous online messaging tool. Currently Skype has a locked down feel but open it up and build it in as a communication tool in LinkedIn. Instant connections. Obviously LinkedIn would need to manage how this works to keep people from being bombarded but it could be worked out.
- Bring Cortana to LinkedIn and turn LI into a real personal CRM platform. I know a ton of people who try and use Outlook + Calendar as a mini-CRM. LinkedIn is miles ahead of that – if there was a better way to interface with it. Put Cortana as an app on top of it and you have it nailed.
- Use the MS Cloud to give professionals their own place to shine. Take LinkedIn a step further and instead of boiling a professional’s life down to the one page resume give people an opportunity to really build their brand/small business out within the MS/LinkedIn marketplace. This gives LinkedIn a chance to open up into the small business market as well as the B2B market. On a side note, this would also strongly benefit Bing because all of the services are connected so built in tools will likely dominate.
All of this is reliant upon Microsoft proving they can integrate a business in better than they did Skype. I’m still disappointed in what MS did to Skype which could have been a world beater. But that was under the old MS. Can the new one show us a better path?