$26 billion is a lot to pay for data, but Microsoft might make it work, says Jon Honeyball

on Azure. Does this person claim to know more than they really do? Is their relationship map consistent with others of similar role and seniority, or are they trying to “big themselves up”? If you know this person, how easy is it to get to that person? Who are the unknown “six degrees of Kevin Bacon”, and should they be prioritised in a job interview? The opportunities here are absolutely enormous, which is why Microsoft has just done its quite terrifying data-gulp of LinkedIn. All that information now belongs to Redmond.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Microsoft will mess things up. After all, as already mentioned, it has a pretty ropey history when it comes to large acquisitions. But a data slurp is different. Just hand over the hard disks and let the geeks go play with the ones and zeros. Let them mine and see what they find.

Then construct a pay-per-play model, with obvious bundles for Microsoft’s largest licensing customers, and maybe a freemium model for Office 365 subscribers. And a free-access model for those who don’t want to pay. Maybe reserve the real AI data-mining for the big-bucks players . After all, you don’t want such insight available to merely everyone – who knows what they might do with it?

Is this a good thing? Goodness is extremely difficult to quantify here. It’s certainly inevitable, and if we ignore the ludicrous price, it’s entirely logical that a top-tier vendor such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google would eat up LinkedIn.

What happens moving forward will be fascinating to watch. And it will be a real test of Nadella’s ability to not only have vision, to not only wave the corporate chequebook, but to actually deliver value. That’s something that Ballmer singularly failed to do, time after time. And yes, this is the end of the honeymoon period for Nadella. He has to stand or fall by these decisions now.

As far as what route I’ll take, I might go one of two ways. For a while I’ve been accepting any links requested on LinkedIn, and my “link map” is pretty diluted and somewhat far from reality. I could have a big pruning session, and thus reduce my links to real people who I actually know. Or I could go on a splurge, and try to water down my presence to the point where it actually has no workable value. Let’s try that one first; bring it on.

Hand over the hard disks and let the geeks go play with the data. Let them mine and see what they find

According to us, Jon Honeyball is a contributing editor to According to LinkedIn, he’s a pole dancer. Email jon@jonhoneyball.com for bookings