Microsoft/LinkedIn fan fiction

Microsoft is buying LinkedIn, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather read thinking through what that might mean more than Paul Ford.

Microsoft is a software company, sure, but it’s also a bit of a nation-state with an enormously broad mandate. LinkedIn is an unbelievable data-mining platform; it has the ground truth about the global economy, especially around the technology industry, and it has a lock on that data. Microsoft will know what’s going with Facebook before Zuckerberg does; it’ll know what skills are being added to Googlers’ resumes; it’ll know what kind of searches HR departments are doing across the world, and it can use that information to start marketing its own services to those companies…

It’s…terrifying. And we’ll never really know what’s going on. Which makes it kind of brilliant. But still terrifying.

Filled with straightforward observations (hey, Microsoft now has a huge, well-targeted advertising network to match Google’s and Amazon’s) to delightfully bizarre ones, like LinkedIn’s secret synergy with Minecraft (!), 9 Things Microsoft Could Do With LinkedIn blends consulting memo, standup routine, and Borgesian counterfiction. I’ve always aspired to this sort of thing, and Paul just rattles it off. Dang it.

• LinkedIn
• Microsoft
• Paul Ford