Microsoft + GitHub + LinkedIn = The Professional Graph
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Loading... - Blanca Cordova
- 06 Jun 2021
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Each of the GAFA companies own a vast swath of our socio-economic system.
Facebook owns the social graph, the digital representation of the relationships that matter in people's lives. Google owns the interest graph, the essence of what we want and what we need. Amazon's making a strong play for the retail graph, all the products and services we buy. Apple owns the idealized self: the better you that is smarter, sexier, healthier, faster, and more productive.
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What about Microsoft?
Microsoft is now making a play for what I'm calling "the professional graph." And it fits hand-in-glove with the Redmond company's forever ethos and identity.
Facebook's got love covered. Google owns knowledge. Amazon takes care of all our desires, perhaps, and Apple our dreams and aspirations.
But Microsoft wants to own work.
That's been in the company's DNA since Bill Gates spent $50,000 to buy 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products and shipped it on IBM personal computers a month later as MS-DOS: tools to enable work.
Now Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella knows that modern work is all about cloud and AI and entirely different software experiences than those created by founder Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer.
But one part of the equation has changed very little, if at all:
With LinkedIn and its unparalleled mapping of workforce professionals, skills, and abilities, Microsoft acquired a huge piece of that. Now with GitHub, Microsoft owns key infrastructure -- and connectivity data -- for the most valuable part of the workforce: developers.
GitHub has 20 million users and 57 million software repositories. It's the biggest storehouse of open-source code on the planet.
That fits well with developers, developer, developers, Ballmer's well-remembered phrase from a Microsoft convention years ago. But it also helps Microsoft understand the people that drive our recently tech-centric economy, perhaps better than anyone else on the planet.
And now, perhaps, with Microsoft's stock at new heights thanks to Nadella's smart moves -- $783 billion in market cap -- we may have to more seriously rethink the common GAFA acronym.
GAFAM.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.
