With acquisitions like GitHub and LinkedIn, Microsoft looks for communities where “we’re a better owner,” says CFO Amy Hood
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In the past couple of years, Microsoft has been a relative spending spree as the company added Xamarin, Mojang, Acompli, Sunrise, LinkedIn, Beam, and GitHub to its business portfolio. In the last five years, Microsoft has struck 57 public and not so publicized deals with companies for purchase.
Outwardly, Microsoft’s purchases seemed strategic in nature as the company pivoted from being a licensor of boxed software to more a cloud solutions company that creates software across multiple platforms.
However, Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood layered an additional reasoning that included the company attempting to be good faith arbiter of the future of the companies they purchased.
CNBC reported that during a conversation at the 2018 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, Hood spoke with Fortune senior writer Michael Lev-Ram about the last five years of Microsoft purchases.
“For the past five years, we’ve been incredibly consistent — buy communities, look for networked assets, look for growing markets, and look for where we’re a better owner.”
To Hood’s claim, since Microsoft acquired ownership of LinkedIn, the company has grown the asset to 575 million members, which is an improvement on its prior 433 million member number. As of today’s reporting, the GitHub community sits at 28 million associated developers and Microsoft’s most widely reported Minecraft purchase has 91 million monthly players.
Perhaps, Microsoft is taking a different approach than it did with its historic purchases such as Skype and Nokia, but whatever the new acquisition scheme is for the company, it appears to be paying off for its customers right now.
