The Briefing: Microsoft Takes a More Nuanced Approach to Deals

Phew! For a few months we’ve been worried that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had lost his bearings, as he reportedly looked at buying TikTok (can you imagine the cultural combination?), Pinterest (a little better) or Discord (a fit with Xbox at least). Instead, Microsoft is plunking down nearly $20 billion to buy Nuance Communications, a company about as far from the social media razzamatazz as you could possibly find. In other words, it’s dead boring.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft’s main businesses of selling software and cloud services to businesses are profitable and relatively uncontroversial—which can’t be said for social media operations like TikTok. Nuance seems likely to build on those. Nuance sells speech recognition products, including the Dragon line of products, to companies in health care and other industries. That’s valuable technology for Microsoft, whose Cortana voice assistant failed to gain traction. It should help them compete with companies like Google, which is well advanced on AI and speech recognition.