addressable market for LinkedIn is greater than for all the B2C social
platforms.)
The trade-off facing LinkedIn, however, is that with focus comes
limits. LinkedIn is successful because it serves a relatively narrow
market with a relatively narrow set of services. Being the world’s
directory for professionals is a big business, but it can only be the
beginning for a company with aspirations of horseman status.
How LinkedIn builds on that platform is now up to Microsoft. The
potential for integration with Outlook and Microsoft’s other
productivity apps is compelling, not to mention Windows and
Microsoft’s long-struggling efforts in mobile. But those opportunities
may also doom any ambitions LinkedIn has to be a dominant force on
its own, since its fortunes are now going to be evaluated based on its
ability to drive Microsoft’s bottom line. And, for twenty years, that has
meant maintaining the omnipresence of Windows and Office at the
expense of everything else.
So, the biggest challenge for LinkedIn to reach horseman status is
that while the firm checks all the boxes, it checks them in pencil, not
ink. Its product is good, but not as good as Facebook. It has access to
visionary capital, but not at the same low price as Amazon. And now
it’s owned by a company that is resurgent, but after more than a
decade of decline. In sum, LinkedIn is the Bruce Jenner of this
analysis: a great athlete who did a lot of things well... after all, Bruce
won an Olympic gold medal for the decathlon, and was on the box of
the Wheaties I ate in elementary school (sorry, Caitlyn, you’ll always
be Bruce to me). But Jenner was never a gold medalist in any of those
individual sports. He was, to use an old phrase, “A Jack (now Jill) of
all trades, but master of none.”
Airbnb
It would be tempting to say Airbnb is the Uber for hotels, and move to
the next candidate. However, there are stark differences that
illuminate Airbnb’s competitive strength, relative to Uber, and how the
T Algorithm can be used to influence strategy and capital allocation.