IF Microsoft has its way, the vast membership of LinkedIn,
the business networking site with more than 433 million members, will
be instantly available to you while you use Microsoft products like
Outlook or Skype. How many of LinkedIn’s members do you want to consult
while also using Excel or typing away in Word? Microsoft is betting it’s
a lot; this is part of its rationale for its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, announced on Monday.
The
companies’ chief executives, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Jeff Weiner
of LinkedIn, explained their reasons for the deal in a PowerPoint
presentation distributed to investors. In the center of a graphic
titled, “A professional’s profile everywhere,” was a picture of an
anonymous LinkedIn “professional” with arrows pointed outward to seven
Microsoft products.
Outlook
and Skype were two of these, and the usefulness of bringing in
information from LinkedIn to those applications is pretty clear — you
could put faces to the annoyingly persistent invitations from strangers
on LinkedIn — if a little underwhelming.
But
there were also arrows to Windows, to PowerPoint, to Excel and, most
surprisingly, to Word. I’m not a Microsoft shareholder myself, but I am
one of the 1.2 billion users of Microsoft Office, and I was baffled to
see my workhorse word-processing software show up in the rationale for
this deal.
Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, at a meeting with developers in March.
Credit
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Mr.
Nadella supplied one explanatory clue in an email that he sent to
Microsoft employees. “This combination will make it possible for new
experiences,” he wrote, such as “Office suggesting an expert to connect
with via LinkedIn to help with a task you’re trying to complete.” He
went on to predict that such experiences would “get more intelligent and
delightful.”
“Delightful”
is not the first adjective that comes to mind here, or even the 10th.
If I’m working in Word, I can’t see why I’d welcome the intrusion of
even a close friend, let alone a bot telling me about a stranger pulled
from LinkedIn’s database.
My
version of Word, a relatively recent one, is not that different from
the original, born in software’s Pleistocene epoch. It isn’t networked
to my friends, family and professional contacts, and that’s the point.
Writing on Word may be the only time I spend on my computer in which I
can keep the endless distractions in the networked world out of sight.
Did Mr. Nadella, who has been at Microsoft since 1992, learn nothing from the Clippy disaster?
Clippy, the animated anthropomorphic paper clip introduced in 1996,
popped up unbidden in Microsoft Office programs to offer advice. “Are
you writing a letter?” it would ask annoyingly. Clippy became famous for
the ire it provoked and, in 2010, Time magazine included Clippy in a
roundup of the 50 worst inventions of all time, along with asbestos,
leaded gasoline and pay toilets.
Matthew
G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of
Maryland and author of “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word
Processing,” said the move reflected a failure to understand what
writers need. “Most of the most innovative writing tools now on the
market position themselves precisely as distraction-free platforms,” he
said.
But
he also said that the idea of a LinkedIn-infused Microsoft Word was
very much in keeping with the flawed “Office Everywhere” strategy of Mr.
Nadella’s predecessors, Steven A. Ballmer and, before him, Bill Gates.
One of the hallmarks of the Gates-Ballmer years was the too-high
priority accorded to new products closely tied to Windows and Office.
That strategy invited antitrust suits, and it also helped prevent the
company from creating new businesses wholly independent of the two cash
cows.
Until
now, Mr. Nadella has actively eschewed that strategy and unwound many
of his predecessors’ bad decisions. But I suspect that both Mr. Nadella
and Mr. Weiner are afflicted with extremely bad cases of Facebook
envy. Every tech company, including Microsoft, contemplated buying, or
actually tried to buy, Facebook in its early days, and all are haunted
by the thought of the deal that got away. Today, Facebook’s market
capitalization is about $320 billion, not that far behind Microsoft’s
$394 billion.
But
if chief executives of the other tech companies can no longer buy
Facebook, they can still borrow the language that its founder Mark
Zuckerberg uses, especially his key phrase, the “social graph.”
In
a joint conference call with Mr. Weiner on Monday, Mr. Nadella spoke of
“social selling” and the “Microsoft graph,” the latter of which Mr.
Weiner immediately renamed the “corporate graph.” That, in turn, is to
be mated with LinkedIn’s “professional graph,” producing a new thing,
“the world’s first economic graph.”
Microsoft’s
and LinkedIn’s “graphs” will be connected, Mr. Nadella said, and
“that’s when the magic starts to happen in terms of how digital work
gets completed.” What Mr. Nadella fails to see is how extending
LinkedIn’s “social fabric” to Word will kill the magic, not speed it up.
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